Spotlight on Amit Fnu: Driving Collaboration and Change

Amit Fnu is a Senior Director of Engineering at Spotnana. He has led backend teams to deliver strategic projects, including a new version of our analytics suite, payment processing improvements, new policies, and new booking models.

Amit’s role involves frequent coordination with a diverse range of stakeholders including our Travel Operations team, partners, customers, product managers, and development leads. In addition to ensuring engineering projects are delivered on time and with high quality standards, he helps his teams elevate their skills and delivers roadmap reports to Spotnana’s leadership team.

When Amit joined Spotnana, he saw a great opportunity to revolutionize the tech stack behind travel.

Making a difference for our industry, customers, and engineers

Amit is a graduate of IIT and holds an MBA from the University of Washington. Throughout his career, Amit has worked with and managed a number of engineering teams at Microsoft, Dell, Oracle, and Smartsheet. Last year, Amit decided that for his next role, he wanted to join a startup ready to drive transformative change in its industry.

Senior Director of Engineering Amit Fnu

“Prior to Spotnana, I worked at various large companies and been a part of a number of successful projects,” said Amit. “They were projects that made a difference, but I felt that the overall difference we made was smaller in scale than what Spotnana is setting out to do. Spotnana is making a difference in the travel industry in a big way, and that was the main draw for me when I was interviewing.”

As Spotnana continues to drive modernization in corporate travel, Amit’s teams are constantly iterating on their approach to serving our customers.

“Our teams are trying to optimize support, scalability, and flexibility for our customers who are constantly evolving their travel requirements, for example by incorporating sustainability into their travel policies,” said Amit. “These are broad-scale problems.”

As Amit’s teams continue to solve new challenges, Amit is committed to supporting the needs of the engineers on his teams and empowering them to do their best work. 

“We keep engineers focused on creating,” said Amit. “We always need to be creating new code and new solutions. As managers, we are dedicated to removing roadblocks and defining the roadmap for our engineers.”

Building relationships with Spotters of all backgrounds

At Spotnana, Amit has found that the company’s leaders, especially those leading our Engineering teams, maintain close relationships with each other. This has empowered Amit to build and nurture relationships with global Spotters of all backgrounds.

“I’ve built strong connections with nearly everyone in Engineering, especially our team leaders,” said Amit. “It has been a pleasure to help develop Spotnana and build new relationships with our global leaders in the U.S., Europe, and India.”

During offsites and other in-person gatherings, Amit’s Spotnana relationships have flourished. For Amit, this has led to deeper collaboration, planning, and coordination across functions.

“I have developed a great relationship with Alexis, a London-based Product Manager,” said Amit. “We met in-person at our global offsite, synchronized on what we want to build, and discussed how we plan to grow relationships with third-party partners.”

Above all, Amit has found that Spotnana’s six core values not only drive our culture, but they also signify qualities of every Spotter. Amit is mindful of the different strengths of the engineers on his teams, which helps unlock his teams’ full potential as they write code and create new solutions for our Travel-as-a-Service Platform.

“I believe that the core Spotnana values are not just calls to action,” said Amit. “I believe that they are personality traits, and people’s strengths in a few will complement other strengths to create a culture of doing the impossible.”

Driving phenomenal innovation at Spotnana

As Spotnana continues to scale in the years to come, it is important to maintain robust technical teams to meet the needs of future customers who provide unparalleled travel experiences to their employees.

“We’re always hiring and looking for talent,” said Amit. “I am screening and interviewing many candidates, especially backend software engineers.”

For Amit, Spotnana presented a chance to drive technical change in an industry in need of modern infrastructure. 

“What excites me about and brought me to Spotnana is the phenomenal amount of innovation that we are trying to drive,” said Amit. “When I was talking to the leadership team during my interview process, I found that we are disrupting not just a part of the tech stack, but we are trying to disrupt the whole industry over time.

“That sounded like a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity.”