Career Profile
Software Engineer at Amazon in the Prime Video org. My expertise is in developing and leading large scale software applications. I have extensive experience in building scalable, reliable and resilient full stack applications for web and mobile devices used by millions of users. My top programming languages are Java, C++, Python and JavaScript.
Previously, software engineer at Google in the Google TV Team. Graduate from Manipal Institute of Technology (MIT), India in Computer Science and Engineering with a CGPA of 9.94/10 (University Rank 1/1957, Department Rank 1/246).
Keen interests in - Data Science and analytics, Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning, Application Development and Systems.
[PDF version of resume] [University Rank] [Transcripts] [MOOCs]
Experiences
Working in the Data Tools, Monitoring and Insights team at Prime Video building services, tools and applications for large scale real time monitoring, reporting, dashboarding, analytics, and insight generation from all of Prime Video data. Technical lead of team of 5 engineers, leading the primary reporting and dash-boarding platform for prime video data from video streams used by tens of thousands of customers internal and external to Amazon, and for live contractual reporting.
- Designed, implemented and launched several large features on the React based web applications for real time data analysis on video streams, retrieval of data fields and metrics using a fully automated pipeline, query execution on data tables etc.
- Technical lead of team of 4 engineers, leading end to end architecture and design along with development of a multi-stage micro-service based application to detect, measure and raise data quality issues in petabyte-scale telemetry data generated during video streaming. Launched the service that processes 100s of petabytes of data daily, proactively identifying critical data issues and avoiding bad reporting for legal and contracts saving millions of dollars monthly.
- Working on architecture and implementation of Generative AI based tools for insight generation, anomaly detection, issue identification and mitigation, root cause analysis on playback information from video streams on Prime Video.
- Mentored and led summer interns and software engineers on the team. Leading operational efficiency initiatives. Thought leader for engineering excellence. Actively involved in hiring and recruiting, as well as overall operational planning and strategy.
Short stint in the Cart and Checkout team at Walmart to build services and application features on Web, Android and iOS devices to enable users to shop online at Walmart using a seamless cart and checkout experience. This involved managing services that create, update and track a user’s cart and interact with inventory management, deals, offers, concurrent purchases and delivery/pickup options. It also involved managing the checkout workflow, such that users can set their delivery/pickup times and preferences and pay via multiple channels.
- Worked on feature enhancements and bug fixes on the backend services that support both the cart and checkout workflows across all devices. Developed and deployed a feature to show new Thanksgiving offers and Black Friday Sale deals in the user’s carts.
- Handled deployments and scaling during the black friday sale period, which is when the apps and services experience the maximum annual concurrent traffic.
Worked in the Google TV team to design, develop and build the next generation of TV experience and drive significant changes in the streaming ecosystem.
- Built client-side and server-side user-facing features launched on over 80M+ devices in more than 100 countries on the Android TV Operating System to make the user experience on the TV more delightful and personalised. Coverage by [The Verge][Engadget][Gizmodo]
- Designed and implemented several features to enhance the quality of content recommendations on Android TV as well as showcase advertisements, promotions and merchandising content to users on the platform.
- Developed a reference application integrating several new features within a TV app such as Cast, Voice Actions (Google Assistant) and Search to demonstrate best practices and accurate implementation to partners and external developers, and facilitate higher-quality applications. [Demo] [Code Repo] (many features are in Early Access Program and not launched publicly yet)
- Worked on creating self-serve tools and interfaces to help improve developer experience and make it simpler, faster and easier for developers to build their applications for the Android TV and Google TV.
- Developed a pipeline for content producers and publishers to integrate with systems at Google, and seamlessly provide content assets and metadata.
Worked part time as a 20%er on the Youtube EMEA Claims Team under Tiffany Ly (Chief of Staff, Youtube EMEA). Claims (i.e., key stats) are critical to Youtube to tell the YouTube story, mission, and positive impact to press, advertisers, users, and other KOFs. Claims require executive oversight and cross-functional (XFN) work across multiple Google & YouTube teams in GBO, GAPP (Policy), PR / Comms, Marketing, Investor Relations, and Product to make sure we properly land the key YouTube messages externally. To help with this mission, I worked on piloting and building new processes in each region with XFN Leads to better define, prioritize, and land the high-level messages and claims.
In this role, I worked with senior stakeholders and engaged with global teams across Google and YouTube to help deliver highly visible processes and claims (meant for public / external use).
- Designed and defined the product requirements for an improved claims prioritization model, processes, and escalation paths, including securing buy-in from EMEA XFN Leads and Global Teams (Claims Lead, AMER, and APAC).
- Helped secure the critical Q2-Q4 2021 EMEA claims for key press, advertiser, and KOF activations; conducted data analyses, querying and verification.
- Managed and collaborated with cross-functional teams in GBO & Go-to-Market, Product, Marketing, GAPP, PR / Comms, and regional counterparts.
- Supported executive reviews and communications to influence and obtain approvals.
- Ensured the org is trained and follows any new global and/or regional guidance, processes, and steps.
Skills - Project Management, Operational Efficiency, Relationship Management, Strategic Thinking, Data Analytics
Worked on Project Sankie under the guidance of Dr. Ranjita Bhagwan.
“Project Sankie infuses data-driven techniques into engineering processes, development environments, and software lifecycles of large services. Sankie’s goal is to consume data from static and dynamic features of a system, learn from them, and provide meaningful insights that can be used to make decisions for developing/reviewing, testing, deploying, monitoring, and root-causing.”
- Worked at the intersection of Program Synthesis (PROSE), Programming Languages and Systems. Formulated a research problem from scratch and performed several experiments.
- Designed, developed and implemented an efficient end-to-end system to learn trends and patterns in configurations from file content and commit history, which can be used to alert and suggest developers in real-time on anomalous configuration values.
- Successfully deployed this fine-grained system on several repositories of large-scale enterprise services to learn a diverse set of rules on configurations with a high precision.
This work led to a research publication in ASE 2021 [Website], and a US patent: Pattern based configuration verifier [Website]
Worked in the Consumer and Investment Management - Technology Division on the online consumer retail banking platform “Marcus”, for the application development team responsible for loans in the US market. My role involved -
- Developing REST APIs and adding features to web services for multiple functionalities required for loan processing and loan recovery.
- Implementing encryption/decryption algorithms for data storage and transfer operations.
- Following scrum and agile software development practices to deliver incremental builds.
- Integrating with various external vendors and internal systems, defining requirements and establishing contracts.
- Tech implemented : MongoDB, Apache Kafka, Spring, Dropwizard, Springboot, SFTP, Apache Camel, Java microservices.
- Also placed runners up in Goldman Sachs Intern Coding Contest.[Trophy]
Worked in the Flights team, under the guidance of Mr. Satish Mani (SVP - Technology), that is responsible for search, booking, confirmation, cancellation and all things related to flights on the MakeMyTrip website as well as the mobile apps. My role involved -
- Data gathering and data interpretation/visualisation of all airports across the world, as well as finding insights on flights and routes connecting them using R and Python.
- Data science and analytics on data regarding various carriers, flights and airports.
- Carrier prediction based on user requirements, and developing re-routing strategies for optimal flight routes (route optimisation - 96% accuracy). Machine learning algorithms for regression and classification were implemented in Python to obtain best results.
- Comparing and analysing data serialisation and deserialisation formats such as Protobuf, JSON and Gzip for best communication between different services.
Worked in the domain of Computer vision and Internet of Things, under the guidance of Mrs. Sangeetha T.S., on a research project that uses the Voice HAT built on Raspberry pi to enable users to check whether a parking space is available or not at a particular destination remotely. It includes image processing in Python using OpenCV to detect empty parking slots and integration with voice assistant and cloud servers.
Worked as an analytics, machine learning and strategic planning intern, under the guidance of Mr. Mohit Sharma (VP - Data Science).
- Worked with large scale financial datasets to understand, analyse, plot and map customer behaviour, as well as predict customer actions and the appropriate future rates of interest for loans etc using concepts of machine learning and statistics.
- The enhanced customer targeting based on these predictions helped the firm aquire 23 percent more customers in the following quarter and improve sales by 8 percent.
Studied and learnt R, statistics, data analytics and visualisation, and data science under professor Sameer Mathur(Ph.D. - CMU) at IIM Lucknow.
- Applied these concepts in real-time applications of Data Analytics (Predictive Analytics, Pricing Systems) while working on various Producer-Consumer situations such as Airline Ticket Pricing, predicting MBA starting salaries and employee retention ratios.
- Extensively used R to visualize and analyze data to solve business case studies from Harvard Business Review with daily assignments and remote submissions.
- Completed a live project under his mentorship to analyse video game sales in the past 20 years, and predict future trends in the same. Also, designed a framework to predict market behaviour and changes in gaming industry.
Worked on a startup registered under Manipal University Technical Business Incubator (MUTBI) that aims to provide ride sharing facilities for students and faculty of Manipal University, collaborating with local auto drivers and transportation services.
- Developed an android application to enable booking and sharing of rides, and built a server implementation for the same.
- Worked with Google Firebase API, Facebook API and Razorpay API. Designed the interface using Material Design guidelines.
Find us at [Facebook] [MUTBI Website]
Worked on developing an app YouTv N Remote (over 100,000 installs on PlayStore) that lets you broadcast YouTube/videos/songs/images/any other media items onto other devices also having the app and paired with your own device over the same Wi-Fi network or play them locally. My role involved -
- enabling full screen video playback for YouTube videos on screen rotation locally
- broadcasting YouTube videos to remote devices connected via Wi-fi/Bluetooth
- enable organisation of local gallery images into specific folders
PUBLICATIONS
Large services depend on correct configuration to run efficiently and seamlessly. Checking such configuration for correctness has become a very important problem because services use a large and continuously increasing number of configuration files and parameters. Yet, very few such tools exist because the definition of correctness for a configuration parameter is seldom specified or documented, existing either as tribal knowledge among a few domain experts or not at all. In this paper, we address the problem of configuration pattern mining - learning configuration rules from example. Using program synthesis and a novel string profiling algorithm, we show that we can use file contents and histories of commits to learn patterns in configuration. We have built a tool called ConfMiner that implements configuration pattern mining and have deployed it on four large repositories containing configuration for a large-scale enterprise service. Our evaluation shows that ConfMiner learns a large variety of configuration rules with high precision and is very useful in flagging anomalous configuration. This work was also accepted as a US patent - Pattern based configuration verifier. [Website] [Patent]
Framework to extract structured information from unstructured natural language text using a combination of machine learning and program synthesis techniques. [Paper] [Video]
Projects
Developed a platform (Android app - over 800 active users) that brings people fond of food together and enables them to buy/sell their home-cooked products by forming small communities of interested people living nearby. Developed the backend and database using cloud microservices and a recommendation engine to provide personalized recommendations and suggest similar products.
Performed basic quantitative analysis and exploratory data analysis of large data-set using R. Ran simple statistical tests on the data, such as the chi-square test, correlation tests and t-tests. Performed regression analysis, data visualisation and predictive modelling on sales of video games for the past 20 years to understand trends and popularity of consoles/games.
As part of the parallel processing lab course, developed a parallel algorithm to solve the OGR-n (Optimal Golomb ruler) problem, a combinatorial optimisation problem, believed to be NP-Hard using (i) MPI and (ii) CUDA standards. The algorithm uses collaborative mechanisms between processors with effective load balancing for enhanced efficiency. Compared the execution timings for serial and parallel implementation to determine speedup, improved the efficiency by 87 percent. [Project Link]
As part of the compiler design lab course, designed and developed a lexical analyser and parser along with symbol table generation for a compiler of a miniature language named “ERPLAG”, a strongly typed language, in C. [Project Link]
Developed NorthCrest, a multi-user banking app (for Android) that lets one perform multiple bank functionalities such as making online transactions, viewing and updating bank balance or other account details and making payments. Used local Sqlite database for data storage with firebase integration in Java. [Playstore Link]
Developed a C++ app with an attractive UI that has a compilation of 3 games- chess, minesweeper and FreeCell which act as a stress buster and also helps science students by solving 40+ different types of numerical problems such as organic conversions in Chemistry; mechanics, fluid dynamics and thermodynamics in Physics as well as matrix calculations, Probability and statistics in Math. [Project Link]
Built an android app that scans and pushes QR codes to the cloud, dials specific numbers and behaves as a kiosk app such that users cannot switch to another app or disable Wifi/GPS etc. The app is geofenced and raises an alarm as well as sends alert to a Management Console which is a linked WebApp developed using Django framework, when the phone moves away from designated location by over 15 metres. This project secured 1st runners up at HackWithInfy’19, a national level Hackathon conducted by Infosys and won a cash prize of 1 lakh INR. [Project Link] [Trophy]
Developed a cross-platform mobile application as part of the Microsoft Code.fun.do 2018 hackathon challenge using Unity Engine and Vuphoria that uses Augmented Reality (AR) to assist architects in designing 3D models of disaster-resistant buildings. Simulations of real-life disasters can be performed to analyse strength and resistance levels of buildings.
As part of the database management systems course, developed an e-commerce webapp using Java Swing with JDBC support and Oracle DB backend. It involved resolving complex functional dependencies, performing normalisation on multiple relational tables and implementing various nested SQL queries to extract data from a large database, to provide features such as search, sort and filter based on different criteria. [Project Link]
As part of the data structures course, designed an algorithm in C for addition and multiplication of polynomials of any degree with two terms x and y, using 2D array representation as well as sparse matrix representation. [Project Link]
As part of the internet technologies lab course, developed a bus booking app using ASP.NET in C#. Implemented multiple concepts such as web controls, validations, themes, stylesheets, master pages, cookies, session and application states, query string, data binding and gridviews. ADO.NET and SQL Database are used for persistent storage. [Project Link]
As part of the object oriented programming systems course, developed a minesweeper app using Java swings and applets. Implemented multiple classes and interfaces with inheritance and abstraction, involving concepts of polymorphism, encapsulation and aggregation.
Leadership Experiences & Volunteering
Worked to provide a community for developers who are interested in programming and development, with special focus on the iOS ecosystem, encouraging students to actively participate in innovative activities and challenges. Grew a team from 5 to over 50 members in less than 8 months.
- Empowered and mentored over 50 students to build projects that aim to solve relevant problems to make an impact in our direct environment by using technology to enrich lives.
- Conducted and taught in multiple workshops and seminars in college with over 500 attendees on different sub domains of application development and design thinking, hosted technical events such as hackathons and tech-talks by prominent people from Apple Inc and the industry.
Find us at [Facebook] [LinkedIn]. Coverage by [MIT Post] [Certificate]
Conducted numerous workshops and delivered talks on data science, machine learning and image processing. Worked with scikit, NumPy, OpenCV, matplotlib and TensorFlow.
Find us at [Website] [Facebook]
Served as TA and Placement Mentor under the CSE Department for the special Placement Mentorship course comprising of material from Data Structures (CSE 2103) and Design and Analysis of Algorithms (CSE 2202). It involved teaching concepts, solving interview questions and clearing doubts while creating an environment conducive for learning and excellence. [Certificate]
MIT Manipal’s largest student club across all branches. Worked with a dedicated team of 43 members to uplift the technical knowledge all over the campus and use computer science to solve many problems of students and the college. Conducted and organised online and offline programming contests and workshops on Data Structures, Algorithms, Deep Learning, etc to expose students to the multiple realms of Computer Science; attended by over 1500 students. Find us at [Website] [Facebook]
Was actively involved in various volunteering drives conducted for a variety of social service causes every Sunday. [Website]
Participated in weekly visits to nearby orphanages, old-age homes, rehabilitation centres for mentally challenged people, and other community institutions. Actively involved in fund raisers and blood donation drives organised by the club. [Facebook]
Developed and administered the online registration portal and student database for MIT Manipal’s cultural fest Revels and technical fest TechTatva. The portal was used by about 3000 students. Developed using HTML, CSS and JavaScript. Also served as an organiser for Cryptoss(Online Coding event) and volunteer for Workshops and Sports categories.[Certificates]
AWARDS AND ACHIEVEMENTS
Selected to receive the McKinsey Achievement Award, 2021 as one of ~1% of over 8,000 applicants. The award entails a scholarship towards further education and professional development, mentorship from a McKinsey consultant working in the sponsoring office, and an invitation to join the Keep-In-Touch program. [Award Badge][Website]
Recipient of the prestigious KC Mahindra Scholarship for Post graduate Studies Abroad (Awarded to top ~3% of the applicants) for pursuing a master’s degree overseas at the University of California Berkeley. This was the very first scholarship program set up at the Trust by the founder, Mr. K. C. Mahindra, and it continues to offer bright Indian students the possibility of pursuing their higher education at reputed universities abroad since 1956. This year, the scholarship was awarded to 65 students from all over the country out of 1812 applicants after a comprehensive application and interview process.[Website]
Recipient of the prestigious J.N. Tata Scholarship for Post graduate Studies Abroad for pursuing a master’s degree overseas at the University of California Berkeley. The JN Tata Endowment for the Higher Education of Indians has been helping Indian students since 1892 with loan scholarships for higher studies. There are now more than 5,387 JN Tata Scholars all over the world. [Website]
Awarded Dr. T.M.A. Pai Gold Medal for the Best Outgoing Graduate Student of Manipal Institute of Technology, Manipal for the class of 2020. Also awarded the Gold Medal for being the topper of 2016-2020 batch in B.Tech. Computer Science and Engineering. [TMA Pai Gold Medal] [Branch Gold Medal Certificate] [Best Outgoing Student 2020]
Diamond Jubilee Award and scholarship for being the topper in my final(CGPA - 10/10), third(CGPA - 10/10) and second year(CGPA - 9.94/10) of engineering. Certificate of Appreciation and a gold medal for scoring a GPA of 9.5 and above in the Computer science and Engineering Department, 8 times in all 8 semesters. [Certificates]
Secured first runners-up position at the national level hackathon held at Infosys Pune and won a cash prize of 1 lakh INR competing against over 100 finalists. Selected as one of the 109 finalists from over 1,18,000 participants across India. Also received an opportunity for the Power Programmer full-time role at Infosys. [Certificate]
Secured a rank in the top 25, and awarded as a finalist in Datamaze, a Business intelligence competition. Received a mention as “India’s top 25 student BI minds”. [Certificate]
Secured a top 10 rank competing against over 30,000 participants in the Tech Aptitude contest. [Certificate]
Secured runners up at the national level online hackathon and the on campus senior league hackathon for project ‘GharKeChefs’. Also received a special appreciation award in ProGeek Cup 2.0 held by Geeksforgeeks, a national level Hackathon with over 2000 participating teams. [Certificates]
Educational scholarship by MIT Manipal for securing a national rank of AIR 482 in the all India engineering entrance exam. Entitled to upto 100 percent scholarship on academic fees for undergraduate study. [Certificate]
Selected as Best Science Student of the year. Rewarded with a scholarship of Rs. 15000 and certificate for PESSAT THE AMATEUR SCIENTIST. [Certificate]
Solved the hardest problem of the problem set in the fastest time in the 18th edition of HP code wars in 2015, in Bangalore, competing against 800 teams and over 2000 participants from top schools all across the country. Also won at several other coding competitions. [Certificates]