Varun Velloor Balakrishnasarma

• As Principal Production Engineer for Yahoo Sports, I'm one of the technical leaders within the Yahoo! Media Organization. Yahoo Sports and its subsidiary websites, including the highly popular Fantasy Sports website, attract millions of daily active users annually. My responsibilities include but are not limited to ensuring the high uptime of our websites and platforms, maintaining the highest quality of service and security to our customers, and making sure our infrastructure meets the demand by being efficient and scalable. I work closely and collaboratively with various engineering teams within Yahoo to achieve these goals. I utilize my long working experience in the field and within Yahoo to advise on best practices and foresee challenges. I'm also part of the hiring committee that regularly screens resumes and interviews candidates to find out if one of the production engineering positions we've at various levels may be the best fit for them.
• Formerly Subject Matter Expert on Production Engineering for Yahoo Video platforms. I managed 360-degree infrastructural and operational aspects of a highly available globally distributed application stack that performs Video Content Ingestion, Encoding, Metadata handling, and Content Delivery.
• Formerly Lead Engineer and Subject Matter Expert on Yahoo Advertisement team.
• Formerly Lead engineer for Network Automation engineering at Yahoo.

Some of the critical roles and responsibilities I have been handling:-

• Design, Capacity Forecasting, and Scaling of Unix/Linux-based high-intensity and highly available application infrastructure, including Kubernetes and hybrid cloud (AWS) implementations.
• Use Infrastructure as code methodologies such as Terraform and ansible to automate and maintain version control application stacks.
• Design and set up CI/CD pipelines to automate seamless Feature delivery and Upgrades.
• Participate in Oncall rotations and handle incident escalations as SME.
• Design and develop critical Business Continuity plans for Production Infrastructure.
• As Production Engineering SME, take part in the early stages of design discussions for new business applications, set up infrastructure from scratch, including network ACLs, various load-balancing techniques, security secrets management, and authentication frameworks.
• Work on edge location provisioning and tooling across 65+ yahoo edge locations.
• Managed the Critical Programmatic/Guaranteed Ads booking and Serving systems distributed worldwide.
• Automation projects:

(i) UDPing integration with YAMAS (Yahoo proprietary monitoring system) (Python)(ii) UDPing modules for network latency detection and alerting. (Python/Go)(iii) Auto Healing and Break-fixing servers in rotation with change management support (Python)Awards:The employee of the Quarter Awards 2013 at Yahoo.

• I administered a Layer 4 Load Balancer farm of ~150 Netscalers/f5s. I tested and implemented Citrix Netscaler singleton and HA pair configurations.
  
• I managed 1200+ physical and virtual geographically distributed Web/Database servers.
  
• Administered CDN configurations for AOL web properties worldwide.
• Automated creating and updating HTTP redirects for various AOL web properties such as aol.com.
  

Awards:Star Performer Award - 2009

• Systems Engineer for LAMP and Ruby On Rails-based web hosting clients.
  Worked 250+ Linux/Unix/Windows-based shared and dedicated web and database servers.
  Provisioned and installed servers, deployed website code, and added module support and compilations for Apache, CPanel, and Webmin.
  Conducted Security audits, worked on firewalls to prevent DDOS, and provided troubleshooting support for 200+ clients.
  Worked 24/7 emergency support and incident management.
  Mentored new employees onboard. Created documentation for level 1 and 2 support to follow.