Vijay ArunkumarSoftware Engineering Lead
  • (510) 541-8740
  • thekumar@gmail.com
  • Palo Alto, California, US

Seasoned Software Engineering Lead. Curious about the cutting edge. Obsessed about keeping things simple.

Experience

FounderYaki, Inc. · Palo Alto, CA
Feb 2023 - Present

Building Sailfin.ai, an AI based stock market research tool, and Datayaki.com, an end-to-end encrypted, privacy-first, collaborative platform for building and sharing data analytics dashboards on the web using LLMs.

  • Iterating through multiple cycles of product and feature development in search of PMF.
  • Open sourced @yaki-inc/crypto - a simple, secure, and easy to use crypto library.
  • Datayaki is built using Firebase(Auth + Firestore) and React/Typescript backed by vendor-agnostic LLMs from OpenAI, Google Vertex, LLAMA, and Mixtral.
  • Sailfin.ai is built using Vercel, Next.js, and Prisma, and backed by vendor-agnostic LLMs from OpenAI, Google Gemini, and local Ollama.
Principal EngineerSkiff · New York, NY / San Francisco, CA
Apr 2022 - Jan 2023

As senior member of engineering team, oversaw design decisions and implemented product features to ensure scalability with user/feature/organizational growth. Also, led the effort to improve our backend service's reliability and performance.

  • Improved p95 response time for backend service by ~20x from 1.2s to 65ms.
  • Improved DB CPU load by ~100x by improving our schema to simplify joins.
  • Built web3 wallet-based addressing for Skiff Mail.
  • Integrated with ENS and Ethereum blockchain via Infura and Alchemy APIs.
  • Built our drip-campaign mass mailer.
  • Unified our disparate GraphQL client libraries to streamline frontend development.
Software Development EngineerAWS - Amazon · New York, NY
Apr 2020 - Apr 2022

I was an engineer in the Enterprise Support Billing service team within AWS Commerce Platform org, where I was responsible for improving workflows and processes used to bill our high-spend enterprise customers.

  • Led the effort to improve customer onboarding from ~2 weeks to ~2 hours.
  • Iteratively improved speed, accuracy, and reliability of our monthly bill-runs.
  • Worked with PMs, TAMs, and Customers on resolving billing issues.
  • Improved processes/workflows related to sensitive customer data in SCIFs.
  • Built features and improvements in our React/Redux Billing Dashboard.
Senior Software EngineerDropbox · New York, NY
Jul 2018 - Feb 2020

I was an engineer on Dropbox Showcase and Paper Platform teams, where I was responsible for building UI components and product features, as well as for improving developer experience by streamlining our service and code dependencies. I was also responsible for improving Showcase's product reliability by implementing a comprehensive suite of Jest/Enzyme unit tests and Selenium/Capybara integration tests.

  • Improved Showcase's test coverage from <40% to >80%.
  • Delivered HIPAA Compliance for Dropbox Paper.
  • Streamlined and untangled bazel dependencies to improve build/test times.
  • Built a shared service sandbox and proxy to vastly improve devbox memory footprint.
Senior Software EngineerGoogle · New York, NY
Jan 2016 - Dec 2017

As a Senior member of Docs Comments team (Docos), I was responsible for working with PM, UX, and Eng Managers to deliver collaborative features related to Docs and Comments from ideation to launch.

  • Built “Instant Mentions” and “Action Items” for Web, Android, and iOS.
  • Delivered design for syncing Action Items with Calendar Reminders.
  • Improved Comments UX rendering performance by >98% on the web.
  • Led STRIDE modeling and security review for “Copy Comments”.
  • Managed and mentored our team's Engineering Resident.
Data Science ConsultantDeepDyve · Redwood City, CA
Jun 2015 - Dec 2015

I consulted for this scientific article publishing on their data mining efforts to help with search, retention, and discoverability.

  • “Others also viewed” - based on 3-gram link analysis of views by readers.
  • “More from the authors” - based on the number of common authors.
  • Implemented a simple cookie based mechanism for linking views.
  • Implemented ranking algorithms using Hadoop MR.
Senior Web EngineerShutterfly · Redwood City, CA
Jun 2013 - Dec 2015

As a senior Engineer on the Shared Services team, I was responsible for rearchitecting and moving our monolithic codebase to a scalable microservices based one.

  • Rearchitected monolithic code into scalable RESTful microservices.
  • Designed and implemented SSO and OAuth for API access between our brands.
  • Led Secure Design initiatives and introduced STRIDE to engineering teams.
  • Identified and mitigated potential security risks across our DB systems.
EngineerBread Labs · San Francisco, CA
Mar 2012 - May 2013

Core member of 4 person engineering team, responsible for building our Ad Platform's backend APIs and Services using Groovy/Grails

  • Built product subscription billing, invoicing, and payment processing.
  • Integrated with Braintree Payments and built a pro-rated billing and credits system from the ground up.
  • Designed and implemented our geo-targeted ads feature and integratied with MaxMind and location based APIs.
  • Other features implemented include: Campaign Pacing, Domain/Path based URL blacklists, Targeting/Filtering based on Facebook likes and Klout scores, etc.
Software EngineerMobclix · Palo Alto, CA
Jan 2011 - Mar 2012

As a member of 12-person engineering team at this Mobile Ad startup, I implemented features and algorithms to optimize ad delivery and pacing that optimized outcomes for both our mobile app developers as well as our Ad network customers that integrated with us.

  • Built our campaign pacing algorithm.
  • Built REST APIs for third party ad networks to configure their spend and manage demand on our platform.
  • Maintained our PHP-based developer dashboard, and liaised with app developers and dev teams at third party ad networks.
Computer ScientistAdobe · San Francisco, CA
May 2010 - Dec 2010

Ported Flash to Android, RIM, and QNX devices as a member of the Flash Customer Engineering team.

  • Ported Flash to work on Marvell chipset.
  • Embedded with RIM/QNX teams to port flash for Blackberry Playbook.
SDE II / Senior Software EngineerMicrosoft (Tellme) · Mountain View, CA
Sep 2006 - May 2010

I built voice based search and control applications for mobile platforms on the Tellme Phonetop team, and later on the Windows Speech UX team.

  • Prototyped Tellme Speech UX for WindowsPhone 7.
  • Built UI/UX flows and speech grammars for the expereince that shipped with WindowsPhone 7.
  • Built Tellme for mobile for Blackberry, Sprint Instinct, and J2ME devices
  • Designed and implemented layout engine for Tellme on Windows Mobile 6
  • Member of the spec committee for MobileML, the markup language used to build dynamic voice apps.
Software Engineerebay · San Jose, CA
Feb 2005 - Sep 2006

Engineer on eBay Stores, and K2 Search teams.

  • Designed and delivered Related Searches and Stores 2.0.
  • Spearheaded use of AJAX within the org, and prototyped a dynamic UX for authoring Store Pages.
  • As part of a 20-person skunworks team, built a Product Search engine that indexed over a billion product review and shopping pages around the web.
  • Implemented Map Reduce crawler pipeline feature to automatically detect and filter out site design/template elements from being indexed.
Software ConsultantAOL (Spherion Consulting) · Dulles, VA
Jul 2004 - Dec 2004

Engineer on Netscape Talkback Server.

Senior ProgrammerAccenture Technology Solutions @ ebay · San Jose, CA
Nov 2003 - Jul 2004

Engineer on eBay Stores 2.0 and Seller Reports projects.

Java DeveloperGenentech, Inc (Tek Systems) · Vacaville, CA
Mar 2002 - Jul 2003

Engineer on the Vacaville IT and Logistics team (VITAL)

Software Development InternMicrosoft, Inc. · Redmond, WA
Jun 2001 - Aug 2001

I interned in the Windows XP SystemsManagementServer team where I implemented thread pooling and worked on moving from a polling-based system to a notification based one.

Software Development InternCisco Systems, Inc. · San Jose, CA
Jun 2000 - Jan 2001

Over the summer and winter breaks, I interned in the Enterprise Router testing team, where I built an internal website for tracking our team's projects and testing metrics.

Projects

Creator and App DeveloperFotoyaki
Aug 2011 - Oct 2011

I built a Photo filter and editing app to learn iOS development and Objective-C. And, it blew up!

  • Featured by Apple on the App Store.
  • Over 750,000 installs
  • Achieved #2 rank in the Photos category.
  • Reached #39 rank in overall downloads.
Creator and App DeveloperZDO
May 2013 - Oct 2013

iOS video filters and effects app with cool sketch and comic filters

Creator and App DeveloperRemix / Mix.byCollab
Jan 2018 - Jun 2018

Collaborative video editor on the web

  • Real-time collaboration using OT
  • Timeline editor built using ReactJS.
  • Rendering pipeline built w/ WebGL & FFMpeg.js
  • Sync backend built w/ gRPC, Go, and Java.
Creator and EngineerDatayaki
Feb 2023 - Present

Currently working on a collaborative platform for building and sharing data analytics dashboards on the web.

  • Serverless backend employing Firebase(Auth + Firestore)
  • React/Typescript frontend.

Volunteer

Volunteer Teachning AssistantTEALS K-12
Jul 2016 - Jun 2017

Teaching Assistant for an Introductory programming class at Gregorio Luperon High School for Science and Mathematics.

Volunteer Teachning AssistantTEALS K-12
Jul 2018 - Jun 2019

Returned as a teaching assistant and taught CS concepts to high school students at Quest to Learn.

Skills

Cloud/Infra
  • AWS
  • GCP
  • Firebase
  • Kubernetes
  • Terraform
Build/DevOps
  • Aspect
  • Bazel
  • Docker Compose
  • Webpack
Data
  • SQL
  • NoSQL
  • Map Reduce
  • Search
Frontend
  • React/Redux
  • MaterialUI
  • HTML5
  • CSS
Backend
  • Node
  • Express
  • Next.js
  • GraphQL
  • Prisma
  • REST
  • gRPC/protobuf
  • SpringBoot
Languages
  • Typescript
  • Java
  • Go
  • Objective-C
  • Swift
  • C++
  • Python

Education

Bachelors in Science, Computer Engineering

University of California, Davis

Certificates

Mining Massive Datasets

Stanford University via Coursera

Machine Learning

Stanford University via Coursera

Deep Learning Specialization

Deeplearning.ai via Coursera

Links