About

I'm Rayan — an engineer-turned-PM who's spent most of his career at the intersection of product and engineering. I started as a software engineer at Nokia Bell Labs, writing networking firmware in C/C++ for carrier-grade systems that served 150+ global customers. It was the kind of work where you learn to respect systems that can't go down.

I got my MS from Carnegie Mellon (Information Systems) and made the jump to product. I've spent the last 10+ years at Priceline across six different product roles — flights, packages, search platforms, personalization, AI/ML, and now AI agents. Each one taught me something different about how to build things people actually use at scale.

Right now I'm a Senior PM leading Priceline's AI travel agent, Penny. I'm building the agent orchestration harness, cross-session memory systems, MCP tools, and A2A protocol support. The kind of plumbing that makes an AI agent actually useful for millions of travelers — not just a chatbot wrapper.

Outside work, I build with Claude Code daily. I'm developing agent-native software — applications where AI agents are first-class citizens, not features bolted onto existing products. Open-source tools, prototypes, and whatever I'm curious about.

I believe PMs are becoming "context managers" — the people who aim tokens at the right problems. The best product work I do now looks less like writing specs and more like shaping how agents understand and act on the world.