Intro

Hey there - I am Vasanth. I created this page to provide some insight and handy references to my engineering career.

Domains

These are a few of the domains I am experienced in:

• Microservices, service oriented architectures
  • Software delivery
  • Observability
  • Compute and operational systems
  • AWS
  • Cloud computing,
  • API gateways, aggregators, scaling systems
  • Application protocols
  • Testing methodologies
• Developer Experience (DevEx) and Developer Productivity
  • Developer portals
  • Platforms
  • SDLC tooling architectures
    • Development
    • Delivery
    • Observability and operations
  • Stream processing systems
• Platform as a Product
  • Resource catalog
  • Ownership management systems
  • Platform product management
  • Curated experiences
  • Federated tooling architectures
  • Platform APIs
  • Developer Education
  • Knowledge discovery and support
  • Technical change campaign management
  • Scaling platform operations

Past specialities include - GNU tools, embedded systems, RTOS, CAD SDKs, reconfigurable microprocessors.

Artifacts from Work Experiences

Here are a few public artifacts across my various roles and teams. I've organized artifacts by the role I held at the time the artifact was produced and included the names of the primary authors as well.

Note: I've included those produced by members of teams I led as the material provides insight into the nature of projects and specifics of work on that team. Full credits go to the authors of each artifact.

Netflix, Senior Manager, Platform Experience and Design

1. Unifying the Netflix engineering experience via a Platform Console{:target="_blank"}
   Brian Leathem, PlatformCon 2022

   Conference talk regarding our team's approach for unifying the Netflix platform experience.

2. Backstage in the Wild{:target="_blank"}
   Brian Leathem, Laurie Barth, Backstage NerdOut Podcast, 2021

   A podcast regarding our leverage of Spotify's Backstage.io to accelerate build out of Netflix's developer portal.

3. Platform Experience and Design, Team Overview{:target="_blank"}
   Vasanth Asokan, 2020

   A slide deck I made to describe my team for external recruiting and networking purposes, articulating the why, the what and the how, plus provide real-time insight into where the team was currently in its journey.

4. Developer Portals and Platforms{:target="_blank"}
   Vasanth Asokan, 2020

   A panel discussion facilitated by Pooja Reddivari (Salesforce) and Ron Efroni (Nix) where I joined developers, architects and product managers from Spotify, PayPal and Lyft to discuss our individual experiences and journeys with developer portals and platforms.

Netflix, Engineering Manager, Edge Developer Productivity

1. Opensourcing Java DGS{:target="_blank"}
   Java DGS on GitHub{:target="_blank"}
   Paul Bakker, Kavitha Srinivasan, 2021

   Domain Graph Service application framework on top of Spring Boot. Netflix Open source project.

2. Netflix Domain Graph Service Framework{:target="_blank"}
   Paul Bakker, OpenValue, 2021

   Conference talk on the the Java Domain Graph Service framework and the developer experience around writing GraphQL services that connect into our Federated GraphQL gateway.

3. Using DevEx to accelerate GraphQL Federation at Netflix{:target="_blank"}
   Paul Bakker, Kavitha Srinivasan, QCon 2020

   QCon talk on how we used developer experience to drive a large architectural migration of numerous teams in the Netflix Studio from using a variety of service communication protocols (REST, gRPC, GraphQL) to unifying on federated GraphQL.

4. Anatomy of Testing in Production{:target="_blank"}
   Vasanth Asokan, SACon, NY, 2019

   Conference talk on my experience with testing practices at Netflix (primarily in the context of high volume, mission critical API services) and a testing in production approach for a large scale migration.

5. Optimizing Data Access for Frontend Use Cases{:target="_blank"}
   Brian Leathem, All Things Open, 2018

   Conference talk on the API developer experience for Netflix client engineers migrating from a legacy Backend for frontend model, to a modern PaaS model running on fully managed Node.JS containers in the cloud.

6. Simone - A Distributed Simulation Service{:target="_blank"}
   Satyajit Thadeshwar, Mayank Agarwal, Sangeeta Narayanan, Kevin Lew, 2017

   A blog post on the Netflix Tech Blog on the purpose, architecture and insights from building a distributed simulation service for our playback teams.

Netflix, Senior Software Engineer, Edge Engineering

1. Scaling Service Operations at the Edge through Centrally Managed Orchestration{:target="_blank"}
   Ludovic Galibert, Spinnaker Summit, 2018

   Product summit talk about how we leveraged delivery templates to scale an organization's ability to manage dozens of microservices and remove undifferentiated heavy lifting for individual teams.

2. Netflix Serverless Like Platform{:target="_blank"}
   Vasanth Asokan, Software Engineering Daily Podcast, 2017

   A podcast discussing the nuances of operating our bespoke serverless like API scripting platform.

3. Developer Experience Lessons Operating a Serverless-like Platform at Netflix - Part I{:target="_blank"}
   Sangeeta Narayanan, Vasanth Asokan, Ludovic Galibert, Netflix Tech Blog, 2017

   Part II of the previously listed tech blog.

4. Developer Experience Lessons Operating a Serverless-like Platform at Netflix - Part II{:target="_blank"}
   Sangeeta Narayanan, Vasanth Asokan, Ludovic Galibert, Netflix Tech Blog, 2017

   Part I of tech blog describing lessons learned operating a custom groovy scripting platform which heavily abstracted the cost of authoring and running API adapters at mission critical scale for client engineers, while trading off that cost to the central API team who had to create numerous tools, abstractions and operational workflows to manage the hosted infrastructure.

5. Edge Developer Experience{:target="_blank"} Vasanth Asokan, Netflix Event - Edge Engineering Open House, 2016

   Presentation at our org's open house talent networking and outreach event.

6. Nicobar - Tech Blog - Dynamic Scripting and Module Loader Framework for the JVM{:target="_blank"}
   GitHub Project{:target="_blank"}
   Vasanth Asokan, James Kojo, George Campbell, Aaron Tull, 2013

   An OSS version of our bespoke groovy (and other JVM scripting language) framework used as a building block for our API scripting platform running on the Netflix API monolith and handling billions of requests per day.

Manager README

I've put up a little README{:target="_blank"} to better describe myself as an engineering manager - who I am, what I value, how I operate, goals, strengths and weaknesses. It is / was a living representation. Feel free to take a look! Alternatively, you can just talk to me and learn more :)

Recruiting FAQs

1. What would be an ideal role?

   I enjoy leading teams of people as well as individualized work. I am looking to continue my career as a people leader. I would be open to talking about other roles that might be a fit based on my experience.

2. Backend or frontend?

   I am primarily a generalist and have worked on both frontend and backend distributed systems. I have also managed full stack teams with expertise in both distributed systems and frontend platforms. Though my strength is in building and operating resilient backend systems, I care deeply about the usability of products and thus have a strong mindset for the last mile user experience.

3. What was my engineering manager or software engineering "level"?

   Until recently, Netflix did not have levels for Individual contributors (ICs), nor levels within management sans "Director" and "Vice President". Thus everyone was a "Senior Software Engineer" and within managers, everyone was just a "Manager". There are numerous benefits to this flat leveling, but to scale with the company's growth, Netflix did introduce engineering levels for ICs in 2022 and managers in summer of 2023 (after my departure). If you would like to understand the level of my impact in your various roles, I would be happy to get into a conversation to map it to levels at your company. I can also provide reference data points for you to calibrate.

4. What are some industry trends that I am most interested by?

   I am currently pursuing hands on exploration of Generative AI systems as leveraged in the cloud computing, enterprise and security domains. I am also curious about Generative AI as used in media applications. Other interests include the latest trends in developer platforms, operational insights, resilience and auto remediating systems.

5. References?

   I've worked with a number of people in a variety of roles. As references, I can provide the names of engineering managers and directors, product directors, product and program managers, individual contributors and designers, HR professionals and others.