A journey of a lifetime
A journey of a lifetime
At Safari in Africa for 3 weeks
I’ve spent the last decade scaling production infrastructure and platforms at Google, VMware, Airbnb, after starting my career as an engineer working on distributed systems.
I started my career as an engineer working on distributed systems at Informix, building an agent-based messaging layer between Java services and C++ database servers. At the time, making these systems communicate reliably felt almost impossible. There were no established patterns, and I was working directly with formats, protocols, cross-language boundaries I had never encountered before. Getting even a simple request–response path working felt like a real breakthrough.
That experience reshaped how I think about technical problems. It taught me to approach systems from first principles, to stay comfortable with large unknowns, and to assume that constraints can often be pushed much further than they initially appear. In the process, I developed a deep understanding of how distributed systems actually behave beneath their abstractions—knowledge that has continued to guide my work as systems scale.
Since then, my work has focused on scaling production infrastructure and the organizations that build it. At Google, I helped launch Google Cloud’s first production region and led a multi-year, Google diskless ~$500M program to remove spinning disks from all production data centers, upgrading millions of machines across the fleet. I also scaled Census from a small API into Google’s default production observability system, enabling safe, low-overhead metrics for millions of jobs—work that later became OpenTelemetry. Along the way, I drove several enterprise launches, including Vault, Postini log search, and Audio Ads.
At VMware, I built and scaled execution capacity for the Tanzu platform by hiring and onboarding 25 TPMs across four countries. My team delivered Kubernetes control-plane and platform capabilities across Tanzu Kubernetes Grid, Tanzu Mission Control, and Tanzu Advanced, including regulated and federal environments. In parallel, I led a cross-company effort across five business units that replaced siloed ownership with shared problem-solving, focusing teams on the highest-impact execution issues rather than local optimization.
More recently at Airbnb, I ran company-scale infrastructure programs, including the largest service-mesh migration in the company’s history, & led cross-company architecture efforts to reduce tribal knowledge & improve incident response.
At Google Garage leading a vision workshop
With my son at Cape Cod
With my younger son amongst paddy fields of Kerala
Passions: Travel, music, philosophy, badminton, and cooking. I especially enjoyed visiting the Serengeti during the wildebeest migration, and a memorable hike on the Maunawili Trail in Hawaii—where my team and I briefly lost the path, found it again, and made it back just in time for dinner. I enjoy working with nonprofits focused on education and community impact, and I share what I learn through my writing
MS Computer Science, West Virginia University
Thesis: Automated Support for Software Project Management and Measurement (using WWW)
Note: Research supported in part by NASA-IVV Cooperative Research and Concurrent Engineering Center, NASA-IVV Facility Fairmont). Used at NASA Earth Observatory System. Other Alpha customers included CERN, Lawrence Livermoore Lab, CNET etc. Submitted findings at the IEEE Fifth Workshop on Enabling Technologies, Infrastructure for Collaborative Enterprises at Stanford University.BE Computer Science and Engineering (Hons), College Of Engineering, Guindy, Anna University.
Thesis: Application of Fuzzy Neural Networks to Medical Diagnosis