varunjewalikar@gmail.com · varunjewalikar.com · linkedin.com/in/vjewalikar · +447899682309 · London, United Kingdom
Senior engineer and technical leader with 12+ years of experience in turning domain problems into company-wide platforms. Over nearly a decade at Amazon and Prime Video: led the multi-year architecture for systems serving millions of requests per second across eight AWS regions, built platforms adopted by 50–200+ engineering teams and authored Amazon's official guide on technical design documents. Deep experience in distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, resilience, traffic management, developer tooling/productivity, and cross-organizational technical leadership.
Experience
AmazonJan 2017 - May 2026
Senior Software Development EngineerPrime Video / Edge platform · London, UK (Jul 2022 - May 2026)
Prime Video Edge Routing Platform - global L7 routing and traffic-management layer
- Defined and drove the 3-year architecture roadmap for Prime Video's global L7 edge-routing platform, aligning 10+ organizations and 50+ service teams around a unified routing standard.
- Redesigned the route-change workflow to eliminate a 20-stakeholder manual approval path, reducing change lead time from one month to one day while reducing customer-impacting incidents and enabling Prime Video to scale live-sports support from tens to hundreds of events annually.
- Technical lead for an 8-engineer team operating a multi-region platform handling millions of requests per second at <10 ms p99 latency and >99.99% availability across 8 AWS regions.
Prime Video code migration assistant
- Conceived and bootstrapped an agentic code-migration platform that reduced migration time from weeks to approximately one day and was adopted by 50+ Prime Video teams.
- Designed the underlying agent orchestration architecture, including specialized-agent workflows, evaluation frameworks, reusable prompt abstractions, custom tools, and context-management.
AWSSSMChaosRunner - open-source chaos testing framework for AWS
- Created AWSSSMChaosRunner, an open-source fault-injection framework adopted by 200+ Amazon engineering teams and integrated with Amazon's internal Resilience Score.
- Extended AWS Systems Manager to inject CPU, memory, disk, and dependency-latency failures across EC2, ECS, and Fargate, enabling continuous resilience testing in service deployment pipelines.
- Scaled a team-level library into an Amazon-wide framework; served as sole owner and maintainer for five years while leading contributors across the company. Presented the work at AWS re:Invent 2020 and received a VP-level above-and-beyond award.
Technical leadership
- Authored Amazon's official guide for writing technical design documents, adopted by the central engineering training org and issued to new SDEs at onboarding.
- Published three technical deep dives through the official AWS Open Source and Networking blogs (1, 2, 3); presented at AWS re:Invent 2020 and multiple internal engineering conferences.
- Coached 15+ Amazon engineers through promotion from junior-to-mid and mid-to-senior levels; active interviewer on London hiring loops and mentor in student-outreach programs.
Software Development EngineerPrime Video / Customer location · London, UK (Jan 2017 - Jul 2022)
- Built and scaled Prime Video's customer location platform to millions of RPS, delivering globally replicated customer location data with regulatory compliance. A tier-1 dependency for 100+ teams.
- Built Prime Video's Client Notifications platform - the async device notification layer that let partner teams ship live sports UI updates and the Watch Party feature to millions of customers. Sub-minute fan-out to 10M simultaneously connected devices across living room and mobile apps.
- Re-designed a cross-region DynamoDB global replication system, replacing the previous design: uptime 99% to 99.999%, replication latency 2s to 200ms and outperforming the native offering.
- Re-architected the cache eviction layer for Prime Video's location service - improving cache hit rate from 80% to 99% and saving $1M/year in database costs.
Stealth StartupMay - Oct 2016
Software EngineerLondon, UK
- Second engineering hire on a four-person founding team; built core systems for a photo-based fashion-shopping platform, including an image-vectorization pipeline for affiliate-product detection.
- Re-architected the database layer, reducing latency by 90%.
MusixmatchFeb 2014 - Apr 2016
Software EngineerBologna, Italy
- First R&D engineer; built research systems for timestamp alignment, lyrics-based recommendation, and automated improvement of user-annotated lyrics.
- Published viral data studies featured by news outlets, such as The Guardian and represented the company at 20+ hackathons in the US and EU.
Skills
Languages: Java, Kotlin, TypeScript
Cloud infrastructure: AWS, Infrastructure as Code (IaC), load balancers, large multi-region fleets, cloud functions, SQS/SNS
Systems: Distributed systems, traffic management, caching, chaos engineering, resilience engineering
Technical Leadership: Architecture strategy, technical roadmaps, cross-org alignment, incident management, open source
Education
Master's in Sound and Music Computing
Universitat Pompeu Fabra · 2011 - 2013 · Barcelona, Spain
Bachelor's in Computer Engineering
Delhi College of Engineering · 2006 - 2010 · Delhi, India