Apoorva Kumar IIT Kharagpur, CSE, BTech 2020 🌐 : Linkedin

Tinkerer, Generalist, Engineer apoorvakumar169@gmail.com : week.substack.com

Director of Engineering (Sep 2023)

YesMadam

* Got a feature shipped which Increased Average Ticket Size by 50%

* Shipped a feature which Increased conversion from Homepage to Cart Screen by 20%
* A newly implemented chatbot feature significantly reduced the rate of customer issue calls, enhancing
the overall user experience effectively.
* Got a chat with service provider(sp) feature shipped to improve user experience for both sp and user.
* Reduced AWS Infra Cost by 29% (33084$) by changing application and infra code, reduced latency of
static data and improved scalability of Application by changing way of running app.
* Improved 99p of application by 5 seconds to <1.4 second by tuning JVM and Tomcat parameters
* Improved existing processes between marketing and ops to support them and give better experience to
our users. All of this was enabled by the change in the way we were deploying application.
* Moved the team from Manual testing to Automated testing using Appium, saving developer time and
company cost spent towards testing.
* Undertook Seo project using Strapi and Nextjs 13 to generate 148155 pages to reduce Customer
Acquisition Cost.

What I Bring to the Table ?

* Expertise in Multi Cloud (AWS, GCP) Infra Operations and Ability for Heavy Cost Reductions.
* Have dealt with variety of application deployment, ranging for one big instance, target group based auto
scaling, elastic container service, to 100,000 requests per minute kubernetes service.
* Multi Language (Golang, Python, Javascript{Node and Frontend}, Java {Backend & Android} ) in-depth
understanding to run, deploy and scale.
* Strong security background. Have hands on experience to write exploit and penetrate infra. This brings
an ability to get your application and infra pass compliance (including documents part). Have worked with
a neobank(like Jupiter) to get their compliance done.
* Experience in cost-effective hiring and proficient in guiding teams towards their best performance by
offering clear leadership and sufficient autonomy. People love working with me.
* Strong Problem Solving Ability. Strong Getting things done nature.
* Proficiency in enhancing communication workflows and streamlining the code review process.

A project that I am proud of…

Meeti : Revolutionizing Social Media for Enhanced Connections (Better Meetup)

In collaboration with a friend, we undertook a pioneering initiative to transform social media,
focusing on deepening physical interactions and enriching virtual communication.
Highlights:
* Developed unique features like pincode and interest-based micro-groups to foster meaningful
engagement
* Built an interactive platform comprising a messaging system, news feed, and moodboards,
prioritizing emotional expression and user stories.
* Integrated an emergency alert feature, emphasizing safety and community well-being.
* Crafted the backend in Golang and an Android app in Java, ensuring a fluid user experience.
Deployed on AWS with Postgres and PgBouncer for robust performance.
Our endeavor was not merely technological innovation but a step towards creating a digital
space that genuinely connects people.
Backend and Infra Engineer (Feb 2023 - Sep 2023)

FrontPage

* Upgraded an Self hosted Elasticsearch Cluster with 1.35 billion documents from 6.2.1 to 8.6.2. We
reduced 95p for our search requests by a huge 300% brought it under 1.5 seconds. Running on same infra.
* Reduced the 99p of api requests from 7 seconds to <1 second by debugging and running on same infra.
* Managed Redis In Cluster Mode, splitting, migrating, slot pinning, sharding and resharding with near
zero downtime as user grew sometimes gradually and sometimes spontaneously.
* Brought Visibility in organisation by adding prometheus metrics across apis and infra. Setup alerts for
early failure. Created variety of dashboards to manage redis, elastic, load balancers and apis performance
* Created new VPC, Subnet, setup VPC peering, and split dev services from Prod. Created new kubernetes
cluster and migrated all dev environment services from prod cluster to a new cluster. Ran the dev cluster
total on spot instances.
* Deployed and Managed OpenVpn services for Dev and Prod vpcs in GCP.
* Built MCX-Exchange(Commodity) data-feed socket subscriber in golang.
* Built a Finance Chat service from scratch using OpenAI apis.

Backend and Infra Engineer (Aug 2022 - Feb 2023)

NucashMoney

* Redesigned encryption to avoid Kms rate limiting and improved latency by 900ms
* Improved Ci-Cd pipeline for multistage deployment using jenkins. Improved latency by 5 minute
* Provided Visibility, Monitoring for EKS and Services performance to the whole team via a suit of tools like
opentelemetry, lens making life of developer easy.
* Improved communications and code review inside team.
* Made services stable and standardised errors and logging across multiple services and languages.
* Reduced cost of AWS by around 18000$ using a series of optimisations like spot instances
* Designed fault tolerant account opening flow.
* Added multi-language async-task worker for golang and python
* Created distributed cron for golang from scratch using redlock
* Developed and Deployed microservices in golang and python.
* Created python scripts to manage multi account terraform
* Created infrastructure for multi-az k8s deployment
* Worked with banking partners for security compliance
* Deployed and Managed our own Signoz platform(Datadog Alternative) with distributed Clickhouse
Cluster as a backend for saving for logging, metrics and trace

DevOps Engineer (Jan 2021 - Aug 2022)

Sony Interactive Entertainment (PlayStation)

After Graduating went on to work for Sony Interactive Entertainment located in Tokyo.
• Authored internal design document for EKS testing, scalability and policy management.
• Implemented compliance testing using Kube-Bench and configuration testing using Terratest.
• Integrated global Kubernetes policy management pipeline using Kyverno.
• Responsible for managing, maintaining and creating various high traffic ECS and Lambda services.
• Responsible for creating deployments using CodeDeploy and Cloudformation.
• Rightsized the db and compute instances to save 100,000$ a year.
• Migrated Services from ECS to EKS. Responsible for managing those services at large scale(80,000/min)
• Wrote Terraform Modules for RDS and Datadog alarms and dashboard.
• Worked with Global Team of 25 people spread across three different time-zones and continent, to
manage PlayStation Changes and Deployment. All of this was done while communicating in English and
Japanese
Appendix

Relevant Skills
AWS, GCP, Backend (Django, Spring, Node, Golang), Frontend (HTML, CSS, JS), Android (Java, React),
DevOps (Datadog, Splunk, Cloudwatch,Terraform), Python, Postgres, Security, Canva, Figma [Github]

Domain Experience
Web
• Frontend: Created Javascript KYC SDK for a fintech startup (Finbox) from scratch. Improved core web
vitals like ttfb from 20 seconds to 2 seconds (and other metrics as well) of Nucash website.
• Frontend: Created 2d floor-map to 3d walls and tiles visualizer for a startup using typescript and three.js.
[Github]
• Data Engineering: Created ETL data pipelines using Spark and Airflow.
• Platform Development: To manage expiry and avoid outage, wrote a ssl certificate
management and alerting tool for cluster of servers which included unix and mainframes.
• Infrastructure: Automated Infrastructure Deployment using Terraform. Fluent in various AWS
components, have worked with and managed those resources for petabytes of data.
• SRE/DevOps: Managed operations for Playstation Services, Monitoring, Alerting, SLI/SLOs etc.

Security Scalability and Automation

• Created threat model for smartphone hardware and software for testing various vectors of attack
• Developed exploits for x86 and Arm® using side channel cache and ram attacks.
• Created an automation framework for Playstation using HDMI Consumer electronics Control.
• Wrote a Dependency Threat Recon Tool for managing vulnerabilities in open source dependencies.
• Not a Linux kernel expert, but have written syscalls and object hooking for character devices.
• Have worked with various databases (pg, cockroach) and understand the nitty gritties of scaling them.
• Enjoy reading about internals, syscalls, garbage collection and deep diving inside open source project.

Projects and Other Experiences

One afternoon I was really irritated that there were no easy low dependency open source epub to pdf
converter, So I wrote one. Developed a full fledged algorithmic trading (Options) and backtesting
platform. Co-authored a distributed news protocol. Worked on Autonomous Cars, Advanced image
processing algorithms etc. I can go on and on, but that’s something to be discussed over a conversation