Engineering Manager

* *******, ****

Dear Hiring Manager,

This is Sriram Kumar Nagarajan, an Electrical Engineering graduate from A.C. Tech Karaikudi, TamilNadu . I am keen to

apply for a Software Engineering Role at your organisation and I enclose my CV for your consideration. I am available for

a discussion.

After graduating from the institute in the year 2001, I worked with HCL Technologies, Chennai for 5+ years and gained

technical acumen around Semiconductor Factory Automation suite, Machine Controller software. Before joining

Microsoft India in M

ay 2008, I had a short stint working in P ayPal, Chennai for 8 months.

After joining Microsoft, I had an opportunity to work in Product Key space which involves working on all stages of

Product Key Life Cycle Management (starting from Key Generation, Provisioning, Distribution, Activation and Licensing ). I had

an exponential learning curve in designing, development, Bug Fixing and Unit testing areas. I had gained significant

expertise around the following

● Migrating unmanaged legacy applications (C, C++, MFC, COM) to Managed - Cloud based PaaS/IaaS solutions

(C#.Net, ASP.Net, WCF, C++/CLI and SQL Azure ).

● Designing and Implementing PKI ( Cryptography and Digital Signatures ) for MBI/HBI LOB applications in Product

Key Space. Building scalable Licensing Clearing House services for Windows OS/Features like Remote Desktop

Services, Windows/Office/Visual Studio Activation .

● Actively involved in envisioning Azure Cloud road map for all applications in Product Key Services BU.

After working with Microsoft, I had an opportunity working in Amazon, India from September 2017 to June 2019 as a

Software Development Manager leading a team of 14 SDEs, SDETs and Senior SDEs. My team took care of enriching the

purchase experience for Kindle eBooks. This team charter includes launching New Payments methods for specific

marketplaces, generating the demand, analysing the customer drop-offs and building more intuitive customer

experience across different form factors like Desktop, Mobile, eReader, Tablets.

Then I had an opportunity to work with FourKites ( since June 2019), a Startup in Supply Chain Visibility space which

provides predictive ETAs to solve last mile problems. I manage a team consisting of 4 Engineering managers and ~40

SDEs and SDETs ( Jr/Sr./Staff/Principal) for a core product where 90% of the company's revenue is generated. My key

accountabilities include E2E technical leadership and delivery ownership of multiple products, engineering best

practices, competency development for engineers and people leadership.

Bias for Action, Strike Force Initiatives, Innovation:

Before I joined Foukites, they were leaking P0s/high severity bugs in Production, I relooked their release process and

brought some sanity to improve the release process with short and long term goals across engineering teams. With

CI/CD goals in mind, I started with a nightly build to catch all regression cases in all Pre-Prod environments. Revisited the

branching strategy with a commit self promoting to the next stage of the release pipeline. This improved the overall

quality of achieving Zero P0 from July to till date.

Identified and listed out the set of initiatives and Assembled FourKites finest engineering resources a team called Strike

Force, to dedicate 100% of their capacity over the next 30/60/90 days to focus only on high-priority platform

inefficiencies that are stifling FourKites ability to pace better. This started yielding significant results which improved the

accuracy and consistency of tracking by 12% .

Platform severely lacked offerings like FeatureGates, API Gateways, handling dependency failovers. I formed a right mix

of Senior and Junior Devs and QAs did a weekend hackathon and piloted it on services that attracts lesser traffic. Now

it's added as tech debt in every other engineering team’s backlog across FourKites

Being Customer Obsessive & Delivering Results:

With an apt combo of Product Management team and with the right mix of SDEs, my team designed the Payment

Services coupled with an existing Digital Purchase Workflow which tracks the customer Drop-offs during the purchase of

eBooks across marketplaces and form factors. Purchase Success Ratio (PSR), one of the by-products of this platform is

used in tracking customer events, identifying the set of drop-off points during the purchase. These drop-off points were

collected, stack ranked and used to run a slew of CX improvements to minimize the customer drop offs. Though initially

it was designed for Digital eBooks, later it got adopted by multiple other businesses within Amazon like Retail, Prime,

Kindle Unlimited, Audibles and Restaurants .

Ownership and Sense of Urgency:

When Microsoft was in the press for its infamous Flame virus which gained a foothold by spoofing one of its own

security certificates which on analysis revealed that it was emanating from one of the Microsoft legacy applications. The

security team of Microsoft was hell bent to fix this with no time to spare as it was in a bad press. This incident and its

associated projects brought out the best in me and strengthened my ability to plan, organize and execute effectively

under very tight deadlines. I was awarded Windows Server 2014 – Ship.IT award for the impressive work and got

excellent feedback from other Product team counterparts. I also had an opportunity to work on Windows Server code

base identifying and fixing bugs as part of this project.

Had increasing responsibilities through rapid career progression faster than the rest of the cohort owing to exceptional

performance. The core skills that I picked up through my work experience at Fourkites, Amazon & Microsoft, in addition

to my inherent technical acumen and analytic abilities make me a suitable candidate for a Engineering Leadership role

in your organisation

I would welcome the opportunity to discuss my application with you and look forward to hearing from you. Thank you

for your consideration.

Yours sincerely,

Sriram Kumar Nagarajan

SRIRAM KUMAR NAGARAJAN

Phone: +91-970******* LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sriramkumar-nagarajan-59b42213/

e-mail: ******.********@*****.***

Education and Qualifications

1997-2001 A.C. Tech, Karaikudi, TamilNadu B.E- Electrical and Electronics

Professional Profile

A highly motivated, innovative technology enthusiast possessing 17+ years of experience in the rapidly evolving software

industry and having strong technical and team leading skills.

Hands-on engineering expertise and passion to build and iterate in a fast-paced agile environment with a geographically

distributed team. Extensive experience is building highly scalable Web Services hosted on Cloud ( Azure, AWS ),

On-Premise and Hybrid Infrastructures.

Hire, Coach, Manage and mentor a team of geographically distributed software engineers.

Create high-quality software by conducting peer design/code reviews and developing automated test cases

Played a key role in the future of software products by working closely with product management and other stakeholders

to aid solution development

Ensure high quality solutions by implementing unit tests, driving continuous integration/validation, and supporting the

creation and design of performance, load, and user acceptance tests

Build methods and tools to automate engineering activities.

Work Experience

June 2019 – till now FOURKITES, Chennai Engineering Manager

● Managing a team of ~40 engineers including 4 Engineering Managers ( Dev and QA) and responsible for delivery of

features/products with good quality.

● Understand capabilities and functionality of the platform and products to design and develop new features/

modifications / enhancements to current products and tools.

● Participate in Architecture/Design/Code reviews, setting and implementing coding standards, hands on

troubleshooting whenever required across different teams.

● Experienced with sound engineering practices across web development, (micro)services-based architecture,

automated testing and continuous delivery, databases and warehouses, etc. on the AWS, Azure ecosystem

● Hands-on experience with agile (SCRUM) and waterfall methodologies.

● Scale the engineering organization by focusing on skill and competency growth as well as hiring new team members

and Setting standards for performance evaluations and career development / performance management.

● Define and manage KPIs and hold the team accountable to it.

● Create, maintain and execute quarterly and annual plans that align with the overall engineering strategy and plans

● Partner with CTO/ CPO/ Engineering Directors / Product Directors / Customer Support Directors / Customer Success

team heads, PMO team to design and develop features for FOURKITES customers.

● Mentor technical managers / Principal engineers/senior software engineers as well as associate engineering

managers.

● Running the Reward and Recognition team in Fourkites from scratch.

Sep 2017 – June 2019 Amazon, Chennai Software Development Manager

● Independently managing a team of SDEs. Hiring the right mix of SDEs to accomplish team goals. Assess SDE performance.

Possess experience managing both high and low SDE performers and take effective action addressing employee concerns.

Hire, develop and promote SDEs.

● Defining the strategic vision for my team, partnering effectively with customers and stakeholders. Establish a roadmap

and successfully deliver software that executes that vision.

● Defining metrics to measure team development progress, customer experience, and operational excellence.

● Reviewing software code (for readability, quality, testability and maintainability) in the absence of Senior SDE and drive

constructive technical discussions and audit as needed to prevent the consequences of poor technology decisions and in

the process of doing so recognizing when a proposed design is too complex or risky (and arrange for additional reviews

with Senior/Principal Engineers).

● Structuring efforts to reduce team’s exposure to classic failure modes (e.g., requirements not sufficiently understood,

ineffective team collaboration, long-term impact(s) from the use of third-party technologies, insufficient testing).

● Independent in decision-making and a great Bias of action in making crispy decisions about what projects move forward

and in what priority order.

● Successfully manage all stages of a program (from concept to delivery). These programs meet challenging business goals

and/or show measurable improvements in engineering efficiency/experience.

● Managing large technology efforts, delivering significant features or re-architectures to large, critical, and/or highly

complex systems which requires to work with multiple teams within and/or across organizations.

● Proactively identify risks and bring them to the attention of my manager, customers, and stakeholders with plans for

mitigation before they become roadblocks.

● Working successfully with customers, leaders, and other engineering teams. Fostering constructive dialogue, harmonize

discordant views, and lead the resolution of contentious issues (influence and build consensus).

● Ensuring my team has customer engagement mechanisms, adheres to SLAs, and effectively manages software operations.

● Iteratively improving the quality of the software owned by my team and operational performance metrics under my

leadership.

July 2015 – Feb 2017 Microsoft India, Chennai Senior Software Engineer

● Managing teams (tech front - Full Stack) .

o A vendor team (9 members) which runs on a sustenance mode for a suite of legacy Manufacturing Execution

System (MES) .

o An FTE team (8 members) for migrating the existing Microsoft Partner applications hosted on premise to

Microsoft Azure (cloud) .

● Driving VSO adoption, SW Engineering excellency with focus on customers, simplifying their experience .

● Coaching SDETs and Mentoring peers on SWE fundamentals, Microsoft Azure technology stack.

● Participating in Performance appraisal discussions, in defining their career path, in organizing recurrent Connect (1:1)

discussions (both for people at my level and my level below) by shadowing with my manager .

● Collaborating with stakeholders (Service Management team, Program Management team, Business leaders) who are

sitting across the globe .

May 2008 – June 30 2015 Microsoft India, Hyderabad Software Engineer II

● Managed a small sized team of about 5 engineers working on application release .

● Defining system architecture/design and exploring technical feasibility trade-offs .

● Collaborate with teams across different geographical zones to drive / develop / deliver software solutions .

● Estimating, managing schedules and deliverables for features assigned to the team .

● Ability to mentor other software developers to develop all aspects of their engineering skill sets .

● Interviewing and evaluating potential software engineer new hires .

Sep 2007 – May 2008 CSC (PayPal India), Chennai Associate Projects II

● Analyzing the requirements, design, develop and perform unit testing .

Aug 2002 – Sep 2007 HCL Technologies, Chennai Lead Engineer

● Exploring technical feasibility trade-offs and Analysing the requirements, design, develop, Bug Fixing and perform unit

testing .

● Design and develop a HCL product suite based on Semiconductor Factory Automation Standards .

Additional Information

Technical Skills

Microsoft Azure, AWS - technology stack, .

C#.NET, C++/CLI, Java, MVC, MS-SQL Script, Java Script

Native Programming – C, C++, COM

REST APIs, ASP. Net Web API, WCF, RPC

OOAD, SOLID Design Principles, Design Patterns.

CI and CD using Visual Studio Team Services & TFS.

Source Control – VSO – Git, TFS, SVN, Rational ClearCase.

Unity Container, N-Substitute, Nuget Packages, Power Shell

Script.

OS: - Windows, Linux

Achievements

MSIT Key Talent award

MSIT – Deliver IT award

MS – Ship.IT award for Windows Server 2014.

Top Debugger in HCL – Axcelis.

Nationality Indian

Languages English, Tamil

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