Srihari Kookal

Email: [email protected] | Github: srih4ri | Phone: +49 15252433142 | +91 7204275616

I have Experience in building and maintaining large scale web applications, with a focus on backend development, system architecture, and team leadership.

Tools and Skills: Ruby, Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform,Terragrunt, Prometheus, Grafana, Datadog, AWS, Kibana, Elasticsearch, Sidekiq, Git, CI/CD, Javascript, EmberJS, React, OKR Framework, Agile methodologies.

Experience

I have over 15 years of experience in software development, with a strong focus on backend development, system architecture, and team leadership. I have worked in various roles, from individual contributor to technical leadership positions, across multiple industries including fintech, insurance, and community engagement.

Staff Engineer, Clark Technical Leadership

Feb, 2023 - Present

Maintained the 10-year-old Rails monolith running 90% of the company’s backend services.
- Actively planned and executed Ruby and Rails upgrades to ensure compliance with software supply chain standards.
- Maintained an architecture based on Domain-Driven Design, ensuring efficient code ownership and agility for all product teams.
- Reviewed solution designs for all major changes to backend architecture.
- Mentored backend engineers as the code owner of critical components, reviewing pull requests from all product streams of the company.
Acted as the first responder for major incidents in Clark’s applications and dependent services, resolving multiple incidents within SLA and minimizing impact on business operations.
Collaborated with engineering managers and the director to set and achieve annual engineering goals for Clark’s German business division.
Contributed to Clark’s Terraform, Terragrunt, Helm, and Docker codebases, managing infrastructure across six businesses and four regions.
Proposed and built a resilient, highly scalable signup system that elastically scaled to handle high-traffic events, such as Clark-sponsored prime-time TV events.
Conducted performance tests using GrafanaLab’s k6 and made performance improvements to Ruby on Rails deployments in Kubernetes clusters. Fine-tuned Puma, Nginx, and Kubernetes variables to achieve a distributed system that scaled elastically to handle peak traffic.
Ensured 100% uptime during peak traffic events, including a prime-time national TV event viewed by millions across Germany. Planned and executed multiple initiatives over a quarter to ensure system resilience and high availability.
Led the migration of the background job processor from Delayed Job to Sidekiq, improving background job performance by 20% and reducing overall costs. Coordinated a cross-team effort to migrate close to 500 background jobs across all environments.
Implemented vertical pod autoscaling and horizontal pod autoscaling, reducing monthly cloud costs by 10%. Created dashboards to monitor resource utilization, CPU CFS throttling, and memory pressure, and made key decisions to reallocate compute and memory provisioned across tens of Kubernetes resources.
Set up SLOs and monitoring using Prometheus and Grafana, and application monitoring using Datadog.
Implemented IRSA for various backend applications deployed on the Kubernetes cluster.
Established DORA-compliant processes for deployment, rollback, and incident response.
Reduced overall monitoring alarms by 70%, cleaned up alerting channels and alerts, thereby reducing alert fatigue and increasing incident response readiness.
Fixed bottlenecks in continuous delivery pipelines, reducing the end-to-end deployment pipeline by one hour.
Worked closely with the database administrator to optimize database storage, reducing storage by 20%.
Carried out zero-downtime database upgrades for Clark Germany’s database across major PostgreSQL versions. Identified AWS Blue-Green deployments and planned and executed database migrations across environments within a week.
Saved cloud costs and improved codebase maintainability by retiring unused cloud services like SQS.

Tech Lead, Clark Technical Leadership

Feb, 2021 - Feb, 2023

Proposed and Executed Automated Voucher Payouts, increasing customer satisfaction and increase in NPS.
Improved the go-live time of Marketing Campaigns from 2 weeks to almost instant. Built an in house Marketing Campaign Management tool, automating all marketing reward programs in Clark.
De-facto Engineering Manager for the Marketing Tech team, collaborted with Marketing Team liason to ideate, plan and execute quarterly initiatives and goals.
Proposed and Implemented the Automated Voucher Payouts Feature, increasing customer satisfaction and increasing in NPS.

Senior Software Engineer, Clark Individual Contributor

Nov, 2020 - Feb, 2021

Collaborated with Marketers to improve the conversion of primary Signup funnel.
Enabled rapid experimentation by building in-house A/B testing framework re-usable across backend and front-end applications. This used a highly scalable weighted hash algorithm for assigning variants to users.
Decommissioned legacy codebases, reducing the overall complexity of the system.

Associate Vice President - Technology, Scripbox Leadership

Feb, 2020 - Oct, 2020

Reported to CTO/CPO and lead the backend team for the core product
Managed a multi talented team of Software Engineers, Quality Analysts and Business Analysts
Collaborated closely with product to plan and execute the annual vision and quarterly roadmaps
Collaborated with Company Leadership to setup a skill based performance and appraisal system for engineering department
Worked closely with VP Operations to meet KPIs enabled by the tech team for Order Processing and Call Center
Successfuly completed the customer data migration project after first major merger and acquisition operation.

Product Engineer, Scripbox Technical Leadership + Individual Contributor

Feb, 2017 - Feb, 2020

Mentoring

Lead the backend team for scripbox’s core services.
Onboarded a team of four rails developers to react, switched to react from handlebars with zero impact on delivery times.
Nurtured a culture of ownership and pride.

Ops and Site Reliability

First responder for incidents in scripbox’s core services.
Provided On Call support and ensured uptime of scripbox’s call center.
Rolled out rails upgrade from 4.3 to 5.1 with near zero downtime.

Product

Built a Business Process Management software from scratch. Over the last one year, this software makes scripbox’s processes measurable, efficient and fast.
Built a highly concurrent Portfolio Reporting System in a short span of a month, used elixir and postgres.
Built key components for a paperless onboarding process - Reduced time to invest in a mutual fund to hours from days.

Technologies used

AWS, kubernetes, docker.
ruby, elixir
elasticsearch, postgres, mysql
LaTex, Redash/Metabase

Software Consultant, Big Binary Individual Contributor

July 2015 - Dec 2016

Worked as a Rails and React JS developer for multiple clients. Projects worked on included e-commerce systems, mobile app backends and logistics software built using rails. Also wrote few blog posts on BigBinary Blog

Software Architect, Bang The Table. Individual Contributor

Jan, 2013 - July 2015

Worked as a Rails and Javascript developer for building two products in Community Engagement.

Software Engineer, Foradian Technologies Individual Contributor

July, 2010 - May, 2012

Worked as a Rails and Javascript developer on Fedena, an open source school management system. Worked on building ‘Sampoorna’ , the school erp used by kerala government.

Projects

Product: XPNS

XPNS - A personal finance app to track expenses, income and investments. Built using Ruby on Rails, EmberJS, PostgreSQL and deployed on Cloudflare and Hetnzer. Blog post about building XPNS

Consulting: Foaps

Foaps is a Startup in the food delivery space, I worked as a consultant to build their backend systems. The project involved building a highly concurrent system to handle food orders, payments and customer support. The system was built using Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL and Redis. Notable achievements include:

Reduced load times of Daily Business Reports to under 5 seconds from 10 minutes.
Built a Whatsapp Food Delivery system, the first of its kind in the industry.

Open Source: Debian Ruby

Worked with debian-ruby team to package Ruby Gems for Debian as a part of Diaspora project.