Engineering Manager at Veeam Pune

Building the Team From Employee One

Milind Chavan spent 17 years in the software industry, ten of them writing code in C, C#, .NET, and Python, and the rest leading engineering teams across a series of product companies in the data protection space, some of them direct competitors to Veeam.

When a recruiter reached out about an opening, he did his own research first: revenue, market presence, global footprint. What he couldn't find anywhere was information about Veeam's presence in India, because there wasn't one yet.

Milind joined as the first employee of Veeam's Pune office. In the time since, he has built the engineering team there from one person to a functioning, growing organization, hiring, interviewing, and shaping the team's processes.

"Veeam's leadership gave us the ownership and freedom to decide things like our own hiring process and how we build the Pune Veeam team."

What Does It Actually Mean to Have Ownership as an Engineering Manager at Veeam?

For Milind, ownership showed up immediately, not as a talking point but as an actual decision he was handed.

"Suppose I have to set up some guidelines for the recruiters. This will be our hiring process. So when I discussed this with Onkar (our Senior Director), he said, you are going to hire, you are going to build a team, you are going to deliver these things. You can decide those things."

That extended to how the team itself took shape: how many interview rounds to run, how to approach candidates, when to adjust a role or level based on who they found.

"They're very open in that, they're very flexible in that sense. So that way we got the freedom of building the team, taking the ownership, deciding how many roles we required, and how we approach each candidate."

How Does an Engineering Manager Make an Impact at Veeam?

Milind's team works on Veeam's backup solution for Microsoft 365, covering SharePoint, OneDrive, Outlook, and Teams, the applications most organizations already run their daily communication and data storage through.

"Data is important, and if we miss this data, then recovering that data is really difficult. So the product we are building gives the assurance that your data is secure, and whenever you need it, we will provide it."

That responsibility touches industries with real regulatory weight behind their data.

Banking, insurance, manufacturing, and energy are the major sectors, along with education, because these industries deal with a lot of data and have to store it in specific formats for specific durations, for legal and compliance purposes.

Milind Chavan

Engineering Manager

What Does Career Growth Look Like for an Engineering Manager at Veeam Pune?

Joining a team built around Software as a Service meant a real shift in what Milind had to think about day to day, moving from on-premises products to cloud infrastructure, network design, scalability, and performance all at once.

"There is a good technical touch on what are the latest technologies into the market, what are the latest languages we are going to pick to build our product. That's really giving the team motivation, because we are on top of the latest technology."

Go is one of the newer additions to a stack still centered on C# and .NET, picked up for the performance benefits it brings to specific services. Alongside the technology itself, Milind has spent just as much energy building the engineering practices a distributed team depends on: structured code review, automated pipelines, automated testing.

"That is really exciting for the team. As soon as there's a new language, there's some learning curve, but introducing it and using it in our project is really exciting."

What Is the Team Culture Like at Veeam Pune?

Even a few weeks into the role, Milind was in the room with people well above his level.

"I had to travel to Prague for a quarterly meeting. That time I was fairly new, just three weeks into Veeam. But when I traveled there, I got the opportunity to interact with the CTO, with senior VPs, with senior management, sit at one table, and have a discussion about the project."

That access shaped the roadmap directly, and it set the tone for how open the culture is day to day.

"We don't feel like we should hesitate, should I talk or not talk. Whatever comes to mind, we can bring it up. So the culture is really open and collaborative."

In Pune specifically, the team works from a shared office rather than remotely, with monthly birthday celebrations, regular team outings, and lunches built into the rhythm of the week.

How Does Veeam Support Life Outside of Work?

Milind's time outside the office goes to long weekends and holidays with family and friends, and the team carries some of that same spirit into the office rhythm too, with regular dinners out together, at least monthly, sometimes more often, on the company's budget.

Why Join Veeam India’s engineering team?

Veeam Pune gives engineering leaders a genuinely rare kind of ownership, the chance to build hiring processes, team structure, and engineering practices from the ground up rather than inheriting someone else's playbook. The tech stack stays current, from a core of C# and .NET to newer languages like Go, and the team has direct, regular access to senior leadership from month one. Add a culture built around openness and a team that spends real time together outside of work, and it's a place built for people who want to build something, not just join it. Go fearlessly forward.