Jwalant Shah
Belmont,United States
Summary
A mission-driven software engineer with a strong product mindset, comfortable in both hands-on project work and strategic leadership roles. Experienced in a wide range of technologies, including network programming, distributed systems, backend engineering, and big data workflows. I thrive on innovation and impactful opportunities such as owning product launches, driving product iterations and feature rollouts, making build-vs-buy decisions, and improving software team efficiency and delivery velocity.
At Netflix, I have had the opportunity to innovate and do more with less by being an early adopter and, in some cases, a pioneer of technologies such as cloud infrastructure, WebSockets, Kafka, and Pyspark. Providing valuable lessons in curiosity, persistence, and problem-solving.
I embrace the values of freedom, responsibility, and risk-taking that define Netflix's culture. Over a decade at the company, I have gained valuable insights into team culture, dynamics, and evolution. From its startup-like origins to its current global status, witnessing firsthand the changes that occur over time in scaling teams, processes, and culture.
Overview
12
12
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Software Engineering Team Lead
Netflix
08.2021 - Current
- Oversee development and management of data platform and services that support business operations across various product verticals, such as CE Devices, Payments, and Mobile games.
- Provide technical leadership to team of 10 engineers and serve as primary interface with product, business, and engineering teams within 100-member organization spread across North America, Europe, and Latam.
- Manage backend data and API platform to facilitate user-facing apps and own data domain that provides metrics to facilitate decision-making for Netflix product management and executive leadership.
- Deliver common application platform with standardized data model, GraphQL data access API, search, and messaging.
- Achieve strategic goal of having standardized, integrated implementation instead of different implementations and technologies spread across various teams and technology stacks.
- Establish systems and processes for collaborative development and knowledge sharing for engineers across time zones, such as GraphQL schema development and prototyping methodologies, code review, and documentation guidelines.
- Key achievements include API platform, which was quickly able to integrate business needs to support mobile games publishing pipelines across Google Play and Apple App Store. Spearheaded adoption of Hasura, a GraphQL platform that delivered order of magnitude improvement in terms of development and collaboration velocity for teams across organization.
Senior Software Engineer
Netflix
10.2015 - 08.2021
- Co-Designed and developed the system architecture to scale Netflix Test Studio backend, driving the evolution from a previous monolithic version to a horizontally scalable backend.
- Designed a Websocket based messaging solution leveraging Kafka, tomcat and RxJava framework to provide a generic low latency solution which was scalable as well as configurable. Subsequent enhancements to the system involved, developing a white labeled version which is used across several teams across Netflix.
- Designed and developed spark based data pipeline which runs K-means clustering models on device instrumentation data to classify devices based on graphics performance, this classification powers a decision tree to select optimal UI effects to enable based on variations of CPU, GPU and memory capabilities across devices. Also delivered data publishing pipelines and device configuration infrastructure based on EvCache to consume the data at scale.
- Key achievements including proposing and delivering a new device configuration system based on Netflix Evcache, which was able to support the code path involved in start up of Netflix applications across millions of users and a million RPS, the solution was able to scale seamlessly and adopt to the sudden pandemic spike in 2020.
Software Engineer
Netflix
08.2011 - 10.2015
- Founding engineer for Netflix Test Studio product, a cloud based device management and instrumentation solution.
- Developed cloud connected smart router based on Ubuntu Linux VM, and java based remote agent which allows users to remotely control and instrument network environments for Netflix Ready Devices.
- Developed device registry and scheduling system to manage fleet of devices, to provide capabilities similar to Device Anywhere to let Netflix users run workloads across diverse set of devices based on specific device dimensions eg. CPU, GPU, Network Type, Display types etc.
- Product evangelization by preparing demos and presentation, socialized end to end capabilities of system and drove adoption of new platform replacing legacy platform with critical mass of users.
Education
Master of Science - Electrical And Computer Engineering
Illinois Institute of Technology
Chicago, IL01.2008
Bachelor of Science - Electrical Engineering
Gujarat University
Gujarat, India06.2005
Skills
- Distributed Systems
- BigData
- Java
- Python
- Spark
- SQL
- Kafka
- Cassandra
- Elastic Search
Certification
- Java SE Certification
- Java SD Certification
Timeline
Software Engineering Team Lead
Netflix
08.2021 - Current
Senior Software Engineer
Netflix
10.2015 - 08.2021
Software Engineer
Netflix
08.2011 - 10.2015
Master of Science - Electrical And Computer Engineering
Illinois Institute of Technology
Bachelor of Science - Electrical Engineering
Gujarat University
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