Staff-Level Distributed Systems Engineer

Shrihan Pasikanti

+1-717-***-**** *******.**@*****.*** shrihan-p

Staff-level performing Distributed Systems Engineer with 8+ years designing infrastructure serving 500k+ production instances. Recognized tech lead who delivered $125M+ in business value through kernel optimization, distributed systems, and AI-driven automation.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Rubrik Senior Software Engineer - Distributed Systems Palo Alto, CA Forge - core (Linux) Team Oct ’24 - Oct ’25

• Spearheaded and served as the tech lead for a fleet-wide Ubuntu OS upgrade for over 60k+ production clusters. Directly led a tiger team of 20 engineers, accelerating the core product roadmap delivery by an estimated 6 months

• Prevented an estimated $100M in potential downtime by designing and driving the kernel microbenchmarking strategy for a major Linux upgrade (v6.8), identifying and resolving over 40 performance regressions pre-deployment

• Deployed Envoy service mesh with retry budgets and outlier detection across production fleet, improving P99 latency by 30% and reducing cross-service timeout errors by 75%

• Cut engineering research time by 50% by architecting and delivering a distributed RAG indexing pipeline that serves real-time, augmented context from enterprise data sources (Confluence, GDrive, Jira) using vector embeddings on MCP servers

• Elevated team capability by mentoring 3 engineers on Linux internals, Disk, and Networking, enabling them to independently resolve 30+ complex customer JIRAs within one month Amazon Web Services (AWS) Software Engineer Santa Clara, CA Amazon WorkSpaces (WS) - Linux Team Jul ’22 - Oct ’24

• Designed and deployed a distributed agent system (Skylight) in Go, Python for Ubuntu, Rocky Linux, RHEL WorkSpaces handling 150k+ instances across multi-region deployments. Built fault-tolerant coordination using health checks (TCP 8200), automatic failover with static stability patterns, and eventual consistency for snapshot-based recovery, improving platform reliability to 99.95%

• Engineered a custom C kernel module with DPDK for kernel bypass packet filtering, reducing P99 latency by 42% (18ms -> 10ms) while processing 8M+ packets/sec through zero-copy DMA and lock-free ring buffers

• Generated a $25M increase in ARR by spearheading the cross-functional launch of Amazon WorkSpaces in a new AWS region; led a 15-engineer distributed team to deliver two mission-critical services in Go and Python

• Re-architected Ubuntu WorkSpaces metadata service with Redis clustering (consistent hashing) and RDS read replicas, reducing P95 latency from 420ms to 95ms while scaling to 5M+ API requests/day

• Designed custom EKS admission controllers and operators in Go to enforce pod security policies and automate node lifecycle management across the entire WorkSpaces production fleet Oracle Applications Developer Hyderabad, India

CEGBU Jul ’18 - Dec ’20

• Primavera: Transformed the monolith into several microservices using Java Spring Boot, incorporating distributed systems principles on OCI to reduce infra maintenance costs by 30%

• Leveraged Docker for microservices containerization and implemented GraphQL APIs. Orchestrated services using Kubernetes and virtualization techniques, achieving a 25% increase in throughput Oracle Intern Hyderabad, India

CEGBU Jan ’18 - Jun ’18

OTHER TECHNICAL SKILLS

• Languages: C/C++, Java, Python, Golang

• Distributed Systems: Consensus (Paxos, Raft), etcd, distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry, Jaeger), service mesh (Envoy), circuit breakers, backpressure, quorum replication

• Systems Programming: Linux kernel modules, eBPF, DPDK, RDMA, zero-copy I/O, NUMA-aware scheduling, profiling (perf, pprof)

• Storage Systems: PostgreSQL, Cassandra, CockroachDB

• Event driven architecture: Kafka, RabbitMQ

• Cloud & IaC: Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible

• Observability &Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana

EDUCATION

Columbia University New York, NY

M.S. in Computer Science - Machine Learning Jan ’21 - May ’22 Vasavi College of Engineering Hyderabad, India

B.E. in Computer Science Sep ’14 - May ’18

PROJECTS

• Developed ShopSmart, a distributed ML recommendation system processing 2M+ user events/day. Built a multi-stage data pipeline with Airflow orchestrating feature engineering on Spark clusters (100+ nodes). Implemented model versioning, A/B testing infrastructure, and automated retraining pipelines with 4-hour model refresh cadence

• Mercata: Built a scalable e-commerce platform with Django and microservices. Integrated ELK for monitoring, implemented gRPC calls, used Prometheus for metrics, and incorporated distributed storage (Cassandra) for data management and scaling AWARDS

• Competitive Programmer at heart. Cultivated deep proficiency in data structures & algorithms. 2 time ACM - ICPC Regionalist. ICPC - GNY Gold medalist & placed ICPC 2021 North American Championship (Rank 36)

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