How AI Based Chats helped OLX Autos Car buyers to Negotiate a better price?
Engineering career paths, career advice and customer journeys with Nishant.
“My passion for engineering started very early. As a child, I started opening my computer and playing with the motherboard, the different parts, and the processors. In college, I installed 16 operating systems on one computer — just to learn,” recounts Nishant.
For Nishant, jumping right in — and opening up the CPU board — marked the beginning of a remarkable journey in engineering.
In this first article, we’ll continue to discuss Nishant’s career in engineering and all the great work his team and him are doing at OLX Group. In the second part, we’ll talk about Nishant’s personal life, interests, and inspirations.
Let’s begin!
More Than Washing Machines
Before coming to OLX, Nishant worked at Samsung. There, he honed his skills but still felt the calling to do more.
“From the start, I’ve been inclined towards device drivers and operating systems, low-level programming, multi-threading, and multi-core systems. My career has been about exploring this architecture,” states Nishant.
“At Samsung, I was working on TVs and washing machines. It was interesting work. But much of what we were doing was an add-on product for marketing.”
At OLX, Nishant has discovered an opportunity to help millions of people. After all, people across more than 30 countries use OLX Group platforms to buy and sell cars, find housing, get jobs, buy and sell household goods, and much more.
“With OLX Group, what we can achieve isn’t limited.Our platforms are used in more than 30 countries, from India to Brazil. I have friends that have sold their cars on OLX. That gives me pride and motivation to do more great things here.”
Each day, Nishant and his team are busy doing just that. They’ve accomplished a lot as they scale the iOS mobile platform for OLX. This has made the platform better and life easier for OLX’s users.
“We’ve focused on four parameters for scaling the iOS platform: Performance, stability, maintenance, and growth. We do a lot of research on specific features on the iOS platform too. For instance, we’ve implemented the password autofill feature on iOS 14.”
Nishant likes to see the impact of his work so that he can continuously monitor and improve the user experience. Some of the team’s achievements include: improving the crash free rate from 97% to 99.9%, improving the scrolling performance by 50% (60 frames per second), reducing battery level usage of the app by 20% and reducing the CPU usage rate by 6%.
“There’s more work to do and more improvements to make. At OLX, you get the chance to make a real and lasting impact.”
AI-Based Chats, Milk & More
As a Technical Architect and iOS Chapter Lead at OLX, Nishant has the chance to use his skills to make a massive impact. With 20+ brands worldwide and more than 300 monthly million users, OLX Group operates on a scale that makes Nishant excited about work each day.
“I’m ready for the challenge!”
Walk into the doors of OLX, and you’ll see some amazing innovation happening. One of the more recent developments is the creation of an AI-based chat on OLX and OLX Autos mobile apps.
“The goal is to reposition the chat on OLX as a facilitator that helps transactions move from product and price negotiations to agreements and deals. The chat uses milestone-driven activity and makes it easier for consumers to go through the journey,” describes Nishant.
To help the seller, the OLX team created a text analysis AI model to help sellers respond easily to repetitive questions and even auto-respond to factual questions.
To help the buyer, the OLX team created an ‘AI cloud of questions model’. The model includes advice so buyers can ask sellers the right questions and move towards deal closure.
Such innovation keeps team members like Nishant ready to explore and create.
“It’s vital to find sources of motivation and inspiration. I always want to see what we can make. You learn a lot by playing with tools. I also like teaching and one way I share my knowledge is by writing technical articles. The content helps fellow engineers answer interview questions and think more imaginatively about the work they do,” says Nishant
Nishant has an active role in the tech community because he sees great value in sharing ideas. It helps engineers learn how to make customers’ lives easier.
“The open source community inspires me.”
Nishant also looks around India for inspiration on user solutions. He sees a thriving startup ecosystem and lots of new ideas being created on a large scale.
“I love seeing entrepreneurs come up with important solutions. In my hometown, young locals built an app for different milk makers to sell milk. The application is being scaled in an incredible way. It’s great to see things like that.”
Learning these stories and sharing knowledge with colleagues fuels ideas for Nishant. He has many more solutions he hopes to bring to OLX.
“I think the OLX apps can implement Augmented Reality (AR) in fascinating ways. One thing you could do is, for example, see if a TV you want to purchase would fit in your living room properly. That would make shopping on the platform so much more immersive.”
Team Hangouts, Hackathons, and No Commutes
Delivering good results and creating effective solutions hinges on having the right culture. At OLX Group, the emphasis is on the growth and development of team members.
“We have a great culture of learning here. My team stays ahead of the latest iOS updates. We host hackathons.”
This isn’t just an event here or there at OLX.
“On a day to day basis, we try to learn something new. My team stays ahead of the latest iOS updates, such as App Clips. We even study new Android features.”
For Nishant, the culture of learning helps propel the team further, even during the COVID-19 pandemic.
“We also find ways to be more efficient. Now that I don’t have a 2.5-hour commute each day, I have more time to focus on work. Working from home has made me more productive.”
Working virtually hasn’t stopped the team from continuing to build the right culture. Each Friday, Nishant and the team have meetings where they just talk and get to know one another. Keeping the team close-knit ensures they work together more efficiently.
“We have challenges ahead of us, so we must work as a team. We’re working towards a single goal of getting more users and delighting users. Whatever we build, we can see our impact. You can see your immediate impact at a scale here.”
This effort to build a good culture has yielded great results. For example, the team builds iOS binaries for different markets. They created a script to reduce the overall build time from 50 minutes to 45 minutes. Over the course of a year, this saves a lot of time, money, and resources.
“We try to automate as much as possible. We want to save our time to work on the features and learn new things.”
For Nishant, learning means doing. That’s why he’s been busy putting the latest iOS tools to work.
“The new multithreading environment for running test cases is helping reduce pipeline time. That’s just one of the many exciting things we’re doing now.”
There’s more to come…
That concludes the first part of our interview with Nishant. We hope you’ve learned a lot about Nishant’s work at OLX and what it takes to succeed in the world of iOS architecture.
Stay tuned for part two. We’ll learn about Nishant’s personal journey and how he’s planted more than 10,000 trees.
