RA

Twenty-six years of shipping software 

About Me.

I run engineering teams. 13 years of that, at Ericsson, Lookout, TiVo and now Sony PlayStation — platform work, scale, and delivery across teams in three countries. Before that I built the software myself, starting in 2000.

The thread through all of it is narrower than the job titles suggest: whether what a system reports is actually true. Test frameworks and performance analysis at Microsoft, event ingestion and analytics at Lookout, build promotion across a microservice estate at TiVo. It is also the question that gets harder, and considerably more useful, once part of the code is written by a machine.

Outside work I hike and run trails — 770 of them tracked, including the fourteeners, which is where a lot of the data-honesty habits come from. I read a fair amount and keep the list here.

Raj Ambalpady
26

Years in software

Experience

  • Senior Engineering Manager   Sony PlayStation

    2019 – Present | San Francisco, CA

    Client engineering, working across teams in Tokyo and India. Set technical direction with staff engineers and product owners, and changed how the group builds — delivery speed, alignment across sites, and the engineering practice underneath both.

  • Senior Engineering Manager   TiVo

    2018 | San Jose, CA

    Ran feature, tools, scalability and performance engineering teams across several geographies. Owned the build promotion model behind a microservice architecture, and the device lab and toolchain the mobile client depended on.

  • Engineering Manager   Lookout

    2015 – 2018 | San Francisco, CA

    Led enterprise engineering for the flagship mobile security product. Built the platform that ingested security events for dynamic analysis, and delivered a SaaS analytics product on Cassandra, Redis, Postgres and OpenStack.

  • Engineering Manager   Ericsson

    2013 – 2015 | San Francisco, CA

    Led the team building a global cloud Live TV platform — ten-plus engineers and interns, on-site and remote — and put the development process under it.

  • SDET II   Microsoft

    2007 – 2013 | Mountain View, CA

    IPTV scalability and analytics: test frameworks and tooling, performance testing, SQL Server DMV analysis, and log parsing for reporting.

Earlier

  • Senior Developer / Lead, Cap Gemini Consulting India · 2005 – 2007 · Bangalore, India
  • Senior Software Engineer, AG Technologies · 2004 – 2005 · Bangalore, India
  • Senior Programmer, Shristi Software Solutions · 2003 – 2004 · Bangalore, India
  • Application Developer, iTotel Software Solutions · 2000 – 2003 · Bangalore, India

Education

  • MS, Information Technology

    2012 | Boston University

    Software engineering, system design and enterprise architecture.