FIG. 01 / COVER PLATE MOVE CURSOR · REGISTER THE PLATES Extruded from a serif & printed through three rotated dot screens. Each inked channel registers independently.

Subject

Purnesh Tripathi
AI & Azure · Cloud · Data

Now

Senior Specialist
Microsoft · Jan 2026 —

Based

Bengaluru, India
by way of Auckland, NZ

Connect

LinkedIn →
/in/purneshtripathi

Twelve years in,
still shipping,
still learning.

"The starting point of all achievement is desire. Keep this constantly in mind. Weak desires bring weak results, just as a small amount of fire makes a small amount of heat." With that quote in mind, I began pursuing my passion for technology twelve years ago. Since then I've covered quite a few tortuous roads — many of them still ahead — but I enjoy every bit of it and love making an impact through the work.

Today I'm an AI and Azure Specialist at Microsoft in Bengaluru, working with Digital Native Businesses to help them grow and build sustainable products — and, by extension, make lives better for 1.5 billion Indians and people worldwide. Before this, 6.5 years at AWS across Auckland and Gurugram shaped how I think about cloud, data, and scale.

Chapter I · Curriculum

Work, in chapters.

A working life as a set of short monographs. Each role, its own book; each book still in print.

I
2026 —
now

Senior Specialist, AI & Azure — Microsoft

Working with Digital Native Businesses in India to grow on Azure and Azure AI. Helping customers build sustainable products that make lives better for 1.5 billion Indians (and the rest of the world). Bengaluru, Karnataka · On-site.

Azure
Gen AI
Sales
DNB
2019 —
2026

Amazon Web Services — six and a half years, five roles

Senior Account Manager (2025–2026, Gurugram) · Senior Account Director (2023–2024, Auckland) — co-led partnerships like Xero × AWS helping ANZ SMBs digitise · Account Manager (2022–2023, Auckland) · Solutions Architect II (2020–2022) — co-authored the AWS blog on building human-review workflows with Amazon Translate + Augmented AI · Solutions Architect (2019–2020).

AWS
Cloud
SA → AM
NZ → IN
2017 —
2019

Chief Technology Officer — Narrative Muse

Led the technology team at an Auckland startup building a book & film recommender for women-led stories. Owned ML, data mining, and the user-feedback loop end-to-end. Previously Data Scientist at Narrative Muse (Nov 2017 – Aug 2018) before stepping into the CTO role.

CTO
ML
Startup
2018 —
2019

Data Scientist — TRA New Zealand

At New Zealand's leading human-behaviour research agency — processing big-data surveys into insights clients could actually act on. "We know people" was the brief; data science was the method. Also briefly Data Analyst at realestate.co.nz (2019). Auckland, NZ.

Data
Research
NZ
2013 —
2015

Founder — Wreath Engineering Services Pvt. Ltd.

Founded during undergrad — built products to help consumers be more productive both online and offline. First company, first customers, first hard lessons in shipping and GTM.

Founder
0→1
India
Chapter II · Academy

Formal schooling.

Two degrees — one in the land of Sir Ronald Fisher, the other where I started.

II
2017 —
2018

M. Prof. Studies, Data Science — University of Auckland

Pursued the craft at the birthplace of R. Learned to handle datasets from problematically small to problematically large, and predictive analysis across both. Alongside the degree: President, University of Auckland Data Science Club (2018); Class Representative, CompSci 753 — Uncertainty in Data (2017).

MS
Data Sci
NZ
2011 —
2015

B.Tech, Information Technology — G.B.P.U.A&T Pantnagar

Bachelor's in Information Technology at the College of Technology, Pantnagar. President, Society for Technical Advancements & Nationwide Computer Education (STANCE). Chairman, Indian Society for Technical Education (2014 – 2015). Speaker at the Texas Instruments India Educator's Conference. First place, Abhivyakti '14 technical paper competition.

B.Tech
IT
India
Chapter III · Writing

Published on LinkedIn.

Articles and longer posts — things I've thought about enough to write down.

III
Post · Feb 2026

A story about unexpected paths & new beginnings

On leaving AWS after 6.5 years and joining Microsoft. The short conversation at the University of Auckland's $100k Challenge in 2019 that shaped the next chapter — and what I carry into the new one.

Read more on LinkedIn →
267 · 107
Post · Aug 2024

5 years and 1 day — at Amazon

Writing down how it felt to cross five years at Amazon, so future me can still recall what present me was feeling. Memory is imperfect; the internet is less so.

Read more on LinkedIn →
193 · 48
Post · Aug 2024

AWS Cloud Day · Securing critical identities

Notes from an AWS Cloud Day — AI Edition in New Zealand, with TradeMe's Kieran Cornelius sharing how enterprises should think about identity in the cloud.

Read more on LinkedIn →
50 · 6
Post · Jul 2024

Expectation is the root cause of all disappointment

On the thin line between a favour and an entitlement, told through a story about moving out of a shared apartment and carried back to how customer relationships go wrong.

Read more on LinkedIn →
47 · 2
Post · Jul 2024

On the Fair Digital News Bargaining Bill

A note on revenue-sharing models for news in an age of abundant content. Humans shouldn't be doing arbitrage for bots; computers will have to solve this among themselves.

Read more on LinkedIn →
6 · —
Post · Jun 2024

Think deeply, or jump in the pit?

When is it better to reason carefully, and when to just start? A short, in-progress thread on experimentation — reasoning out loud.

Read more on LinkedIn →
13 · —
Post · Sep 2023

On #LazySpam

Design tips for spammers, as satire. A fake license-renewal email, picked apart for the tells — continuous improvement, even in the dark arts.

Read more on LinkedIn →
16 · —
Post · Sep 2023

AWS GenAI Day · Auckland

The Gen-AI use cases I kept getting asked about — beyond chatbots and doc-scrapers — with a panel of New Zealand startups.

Read more on LinkedIn →
6 · —
Post · Aug 2023

NZGDC 2023

A wrap from the New Zealand Game Developers Conference — an afternoon with devs, artists, designers and cosplay, and a thank-you to the AWS team who leaned in.

Read more on LinkedIn →
116 · 4
Post · Aug 2023

Monitoring & the Well-Architected question

An airline site down all morning, and the observability question that quietly fails most workloads — "how do you monitor every component of the workload?"

Read more on LinkedIn →
5 · 1
Article · Jun 2021

The little boy and the dragon

A folklore retelling — "A little boy once came home from school and noticed…" — about growing up, noticing, and the small moments we overlook.

Read more on LinkedIn →
Featured
Post · Mar 2021

"It'll look great on your CV" — on compensation

A 2017 coffee meeting about an unpaid startup role, recounted. On why "great for your CV" is often a PC way of saying "great for my bank account." People who actually want to work with you, pay you.

Read more on LinkedIn →
172 · 3

More on LinkedIn →

Chapter IV · Works

Table of contents.

Recent projects — placeholders for now. Real entries rolling in.

IV
001.
Project One
A short, honest description — the thesis, the build, and what I'd do differently.
2026 · Essay
002.
Project Two
An experiment that became a tool; a tool that became a daily habit.
2025 · Tool
003.
Project Three
A weekend build that refused to stay a weekend build.
2025 · Toy
004.
Project Four
A piece of writing I care about more than the code it generated.
2024 · Writing
Chapter V · Films

On the moving image.

Video essays. Slower than the feed, more footnotes than you'd expect. Placeholders for now.

V
Feature · 14:222026

On building in the open

A quiet argument for letting people see the scaffolding — not as marketing, but as a kind of honesty.

Essay · 07:082025

Taste is a system

Why the people I respect most have strong, small, boring preferences — and how to build one yourself.

Chapter VI · Audio

Read aloud.

A short audio essay series. Subscribe anywhere, or press play below. Placeholders for now.

VI
EP. 04
The middle place
18m 42s · 2026.03.11
EP. 03
Why I stopped reading strategy decks
22m 10s · 2026.02.04
EP. 02
A walk with my codebase
11m 08s · 2026.01.19
EP. 01
Why audio?
6m 44s · 2025.12.21

The editorial

A portfolio in the form of a small printed monograph. Six chapters: Curriculum, Academy, and Writing are real; Works, Films, and Audio are placeholders for things I'll publish next.

The cover

One Three.js artefact — extruded serif typography rendered through a live Risograph press shader with cursor-driven misregistration. The press runs loud only on the cover; everywhere else the ink sits quietly in the margins.

Colophon

Typeset in Cormorant Garamond and JetBrains Mono. Static HTML, Three.js self-hosted and ES-module-loaded via importmap. No build step. Hosted on Amazon S3, distributed through CloudFront, continuously deployed via Jenkins on every push to master.