Product & Technology Executive
- Currently
- Head of Mapping, Lyft
- Based in
- San Francisco Bay Area
Achal Prabhakar
I build, lead, and grow organizations that bring engineering, product, data science, AI, and operations together, and I shape them into places where people are glad to work and proud to belong. Their engagement is where the results come from. Together we have built products and planet-scale platforms across retail, travel, security, and maps and location, for consumers and enterprises, in classical systems and in AI. Those teams add up to thousands of people across three continents. My ownership has grown with the work, from products to billion-dollar portfolios to the P&L itself. I remain a builder at heart, and a practitioner of the tradecraft.
- 1995
Independent
Software development and entrepreneurship
- 2000
Los Alamos & NASA
High performance computing research
- 2004
Citigroup
Global business systems transformation
- 2008
Microsoft
Development management, shared services UX
- 2012
Expedia
A modern travel platform serving billions of users and partners; helped establish Expedia in India
- 2016
Amazon
GM, Selection Discovery
- 2017
HERE
Head of Product and Engineering; 1000+ person global org
- 2020
Landing AI
Data-centric ML platform
- 2023
1Password
VP, Product Engineering
- 2025
Lyft
Head of Mapping
Leadership arc
Engineering at scale
1000+ strong global orgs, billion-dollar platforms
HERE, Expedia, Microsoft
Product leadership
Head of Product, $1B+ portfolio of 40+ products
HERE, 1Password
General management
Owning the business across product, eng, data science, AI, and ops
Amazon, Lyft
Things I build
Hermetic
Open sourceA local-first AI data analyst. Ask questions of your data in natural language, get an interactive dashboard, and the model never sees your rows.
The Front Page
LiveThe day’s headlines from 80 countries, ranked by how many independent outlets thought a story mattered. No accounts, no ads, no personalisation.
Flow Writer
In developmentA desktop editor that turns natural writing into publication-quality LaTeX, so you never have to learn the markup to get the typesetting.
Behind Every Them
LiveAn argument against abstraction, built as software. Zoom from a category down to one family’s ordinary Tuesday, then meet the family somewhere else whose worries are already yours.
Writing
- Hermetic in September: catalogs, a desktop app, and a server for your agent20 September 2026
Point Hermetic at a data catalog and it becomes one source with many tables. It is now a signed desktop app that runs analysis without Docker, and an MCP server any agent can use as its analysis room.
- Hermetic since June: every number in the report traces to a line of code9 August 2026
Since June I rebuilt Hermetic so a language model never types a number. The model picks which claims to make. Tested code computes the values, renders the units, and attaches the data checks.
- Hermetic in June: clicking into answers, querying warehouses, and trusting the numbers28 June 2026
You can click into a dashboard now. It works on real data warehouses, for roughly 28 cents a run. And most of the month went on reliability and trust, because the first two only matter if you can believe the result.
- I directed. I didn’t type.3 June 2026
Three side projects, six months, zero lines of code in my own hand. The surprise was not how much AI could build. It was what being able to build anything did to me.