I don't know what you're getting at by this statement.
I'm asking how it comes to be that someone fresh out of uni is immediately made a Team Lead. It doesn't tally with my understanding of career ladders.
Also, I've clearly glossed over a bunch of details but I wasn't hired as a team lead. That being said when management saw that I was capable of driving the team (mostly) on my own, they progressively stepped back further and further until I was essentially running the team. This was over the course of a few years, which I've compressed in the writeup.
All that to say that career ladders aren't fixed, and if you find yourself in the right place at the right time, you can bypass a lot of the traditional ladder climbing.
Saying "Maybe his teams were all India based?" sounds dismissive or pejorative, as though you were saying that he must have been somewhere that was not doing premier work, or working as part of a cooperative team in a way that valued the work he and his team did.
However the essay clearly described how innovative his ongoing work and contributions were when they were being done, including linking to research papers. They were progressively pushing forward the state of the art in the database world, and did it in production in wide deployment. What happened was that the culture at IBM identified him as someone who could lead, and as I described, their database organizations at the time helped grow people into these roles.