Engineering Manager

Vijay Gullapalli

+1-669-***-**** ● ************@*****.*** ● www.linkedin.com/in/vijaygullapalli

Sr. Director of Engineering

Driving innovation through exceptional leadership skills

High-energy Senior Director of Engineering with expertise in Network and Cloud Security domains. Proven track record of driving execution, innovation, and providing technical leadership. Quick, eager learner who picks up new technologies easily. Additional areas of expertise include:

Cloud Computing SaaS Web Security IPS Firewalls

Software Engineering Leadership Cross-Functional Leadership Agile Methodologies

Software Design & Development Coaching Mentoring

Executive Highlights

Achieved high quality releases on schedule for cloud access security broker (CASB), Firewall & IPS.

Advanced culture of innovation with team members submitting IDFs/patents.

Boosted product stability and supportability via initiatives to improve quality and reduce technical debt.

Professional Experience

McAfee 2014-Present

Sr. Director of Engineering, Cloud Security

Led team of 160+ engineers, architects, and engineering managers with full engineering ownership for core components of:

oCloud access security broker (CASB)

oWeb Gateway & Web SaaS

oContent – Cloud Application ID & Risk, URL Categorization

oData Loss Prevention

oEmail Gateway & Email SaaS

Full engineering responsibility of cloud application connectors, reporting, McAfee client proxy (host agent to redirect traffic), and user interface (UI) components. Served as engineering leader for DLP and web gateway/SaaS components developed in India. Contributed to steering team, planning, and war room meetings driving product roadmap, execution, and quality.

Achievements

Delivered CASB meeting all requirements on schedule by successfully collaborating with teams from diverse geographic locations (UK, Germany, and Israel).

Ensured strong technical expertise and module/product ownership in growing the team from 80 to 160 by establishing new product teams with architects and senior technical talent; transformed some teams from sustenance only to partnership/full ownership.

Drove innovation from zero to the team’s submitting IDFs/patents and presenting at innovation and customer/partner events, by championing a culture to drive new ideas.

oEnabled graymail detection without requiring user input (U.S. patent filing approved).

oReduced manual effort from eight hours to two by applying machine learning to automate spam classification.

oProduced a proof of concept for cloud application (e.g., Box, Google Drive, SharePoint) API integration for CASB policy enforcement (e.g., detection, deletion, encryption).

oEnhanced the native detection engine to detect intrusion prevention system (IPS) exploits (http/non-http).

McAfee 2010-2013

Director of Engineering, Firewalls

Orchestrated a fast paced, dynamic engineering team of 55+ engineers, three development managers, and two quality assurance (QA) managers with development, QA, and sustenance responsibilities for McAfee Firewall Enterprise and Endpoint Intelligence Agent (EIA). Developed team technical expertise and product ownership. Collaborated with product managers and other engineering leaders in prioritizing and defining the feature content for releases and creating a roadmap for the product. Set best practices for development and QA teams to ensure design and code reviews, static analysis, unit and system test automation, and code coverage measurement.

Achievements

Delivered two top-quality major firewall releases with greater than 20% improvement for each release in metrics such as early defects, defects per KLOC, and code coverage by leading the engineering effort and reviewing with the quality leadership team and executives on a monthly/quarterly basis.

Secured 100% service level agreement (SLA) compliance by working with the support team in understanding top call drivers and planning stabilization improvements.

Reduced the technical debt (deferred/backlog defects) by 50% by leading the engineering teams and setting and addressing backlog priorities.

Led cross-functional teams to ensure success of beta and early deployment programs.

McAfee 2007-2010

Sr. Engineering Manager, Network Security

Defined the product content and the appliance configuration as Engineering Manager for the NTBA (Network Threat Behavior Analyzer) product, providing visibility into network, application, and user behavior to security administrators. Engineered the product from concept to release, leading the development and QA teams through design, implementation, and validation. Collaborated with manufacturing and Dell through all phases of the hardware release, from identification of RAM, hard disk drive (HDD), and port configuration through engineering. evaluation, first article inspection (FAI), and gold image drops.

Achievements

Stepped up to take on both engineering and project manager (PM) responsibilities (until a PM was assigned), completing market research and identifying the product requirements, defining the appliance models (processor and interface configurations), and setting performance and throughput requirements.

Delivered advanced bot detection with NetFlow v9 compatible records exported from IPS.

Attained performance target of 50,000/100,000 NetFlow records/sec by identifying/addressing bottlenecks.

McAfee 2001-2007

Sr. Development Manager, Network Security

Contributed to architecture/design as technical lead for IPS product at Intruvert Networks (acquired by McAfee). Served as owner of core modules on the back-end detection processor. Designed & developed a custom TCP/IP stack running on a MIPS network processor, and the primary packet processing engine (PPE) interfacing with multiple processes/network processors/peripherals. Implemented L2 attack detection (ICMP), passive OS fingerprinting, failover support for low-end IPS/IDS appliances (100/200 mbps), TCP traffic normalization/packet scrubbing, timer library, and FIFO/Ethernet drivers for SB1250 Broadcom MIPS processor.

Achievements

Increased product stability/supportability and tracked SLA as Manager for IntruShield Sustenance Team.

oLed on-site testing at Telstra helping identify and fix performance bottlenecks and packet loss issues.

oImplemented drivers to support for 10/100/1000 Ethernet, external bypass, and failover kits.

oEnsured product wins by collaborating with Sales on pre-sales evaluations, including on-site visits.

oPlayed an instrumental role in achieving the first-ever NSS Gold Certification (Enterprise) for IPS.

Additional Experience

Cisco Systems, Software Development Engineer: Enhanced Pagent, a network traffic generation, capture, and analysis tool, and served as project leader for offshore (India) DevTest team.

HP, Software Consultant Engineer: Played a key role in design and development of Unified Test Harness (UTH) to bring HP internal test tools under one umbrella, a multi-threaded tool controlling multiple test driver machines.

Quintus, Software Development Engineer: Contributed to design and development of Quintus servers and server libraries/DLLs for customer relationship management (CRM) product; utilized C++ on Windows and UNIX.

Taligent, Software Engineer: Developed applications and a GUI test automation tool in C++.

Xerox, Software Test Engineer: Conducted manual testing and test automation for network products.

Education

University of Louisiana, Master of Science, Computer Science

JNTU College of Engineering (India), Bachelor of Technology, Electrical & Electronics

U.S. Citizen

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