📧 [email protected] | 🐦 @vinucharanya | 🔗 LinkedIn | 🌉 San Francisco, Bay Area | ⬇️ PDF Version
I am a technical leader with a strong product mindset currently focussed on the cloud Infrastructure domain. I consider myself a full stack engineer who enjoys working on complex engineering problems irrespective of domain. I enjoy speaking and have presented at numerous industry conferences (KubeCon, Velocity Conf, GlueCon etc).
I'm currently a Staff Software Engineer at Netflix building systems to improve developer productivity. I was previously at Twitter leading the Platform Experience & Chargeback team within the larger Platform & Infrastructure organization. Lately, I have been focussed on building tools, systems and processes to solve Cloud Infrastructure Resource management & Cost Attribution (especially in a multi- and hybrid-cloud environment).
I'm also an Ambassador & Core Team Member at the Women Who Code organization, that works to empower women to excel in Technology. I'm also a recognized Mentor at Tech Women (Initiative by U.S. Department of State's Bureau of Education and Cultural Affairs) and have mentored upcoming women leaders from Africa, Central and South Asia, and the Middle East.
💼 Work experience
Staff Software Engineer
Netflix, Los Gatos | Feb 2022-Current
Improving Developer Productivity
Staff Software Engineer
Twitter, San Francisco | May 2015- Jan 2022
I am currently the Technical Lead for the Chargeback and Platform Experience Teams.
- Technical & Impact
- Architected & Built PACMan (Provisioning & CAPacity Management Service) that provided a standard provisioning and resource management framework for Infrastructure Platform Providers and Self-Serve UI control-plane for all developers at TWTR. It utilizes a behavior tree execution model for workflow orchestration simplifying steps required by platform providers to automate their quota <> tenant management. PACMan allowed automated resource provisioning reducing time to provision key resources across Hadoop, Google Cloud and Kafka by over 100% (from bespoke manual workflows to self-serve)
- Designed & Built Twitter's resource utilization & cost attribution system (a.k.a “Chargeback”) for a hybrid cloud environment (supporting DC, Google Cloud and AWS). Chargeback was originally built in collaboration with Finance, Supply Chain and Platform Engineering to provide a holistic view into Twitter infrastructure costs and provide apples-to-apples cost comparisons with GCP and AWS unit prices. Since then it has evolved to provide detailed daily resource utilization, cost reporting and actionable insights to drive efficiency initiatives per project, team and department. Finally, this enables Infrastructure budget planning for the finance teams and cost oversight reviews with the executive team on a quarterly basis.
- Led the Resource Identity Standard i.e spec to map & query resource metadata (including tenant ownership) that works across compute, storage and messaging platform services. This provided a consistent way to define resource ownership and metadata. This foundational work made it extremely simple to bootstrap Privacy, Compliance & Data Protection initiatives (to meet GDPR), Cost Attribution (Chargeback), DataSet Ownership, etc.
- Architected the Twitter Platform Experience "Single Pane of Glass". This UI aims to offers a single place for developers to interact with all platform offerings at Twitter to create, monitor, and manage platform resources through a coherent, consistent UX. This is enabled by offering UI as a managed platform for platform providers to build their UI into a single UI control plane through simplified workflows, code scaffolding and auto generated UIs based on standard APIs.
- Leadership & Strategy - In my role, I am required to
- Proactively identify technical problems, manage ambiguity, gather resources & alignment, plan and execute projects that involve multiple teams across engineering and beyond (Finance, IT, HR etc.,)
- Mentor and up-level other team members on design techniques, coding standards and "how we work" via feedback, code reviews, pair programming & team processes, etc
- Write & Communicate complex problem statements and solutions to a cross functional audience
- Own the technical direction with a product mindset and drive execution for my teams while balancing velocity, code quality & tech debt
- Cross Functional, Organizational Health and Inclusion & Diversity
- Committee member for WomEng+ at Twitter, in supporting the advancement of women in engineering at Twitter and the industry
- Co-Piloted Engineering Mentorship Program at Twitter to make it easier for junior engineers to meet, interact and get career growth guidance from senior ICs
- Co-Chaired Platform Technical Architecture Group (Platforum) responsible for providing Technical Strategy, guidance around foundational technical investments for Platform Engineering Leadership
- Engaged in Twitter's I&D efforts, specifically the University Recruiting programs where I have presented and helped interview numerous candidates for Twitter
- Co-Led Learning & Development Workshops for senior technical leaders at Twitter on Cross functional collaboration and product development
Senior Software Engineer (Platforms)
Crushpath, San Francisco | Dec 2012 - May 2015
- Developed Crushpath’s email promotion and analytics product.
- Built data reconciliation framework to perform ETL operations on ‘Contact’ information from various data sources (Salesforce CRM, Constant Contact and CSV). Designed SQL schema, built models & implemented a consolidated API on Ruby on Rails
- Devloped “Promote” - Social Media Framework for Crushpath.
- Deep integration of email promotion product and third party such as Constant Contact,
Twitter, Foursquare and LinkedIn.
- Built suggestion engine for customers based on heuristics from vectors such as trending
topics. Eliminated static queries.
- Increased reliability of the Crushpath platform by over 25%. Led move to distributed application architecture from a legacy synchronous monolithic system. Decoupled API between backends by leveraging Pub/Sub for asynchronous communication between backends.
- Standardized testing using RSpec & Capybara. Increased code coverage by 30%, lead to 10% lower error rates.
Other
🗣 Speaking Engagements and Press