varunjewalikar@gmail.com · varunjewalikar.com · github.com/neo01124 · London, United Kingdom
A technical leader who takes massive, messy domain problems and turns them into elegant, company-wide platforms. Over nearly a decade at Amazon, the focus was not just scaling up - defining the 3-year architectural backbone for Prime Video's global edge routing, building a chaos-testing framework used by 200+ Amazon teams, bootstrapping agentic workflows that saved developers years of work, and authoring Amazon's official guide on technical design documents. The rare leader who bridges high-stakes distributed engineering with operational clarity, making risky architectural shifts safe, fast, and scalable across dozens of organizations.
Experience
Senior Software Development EngineerAmazon
Prime Video Edge Routing Platform - global L7 routing and traffic-management layer
- Architected the platform to make route changes fast and safe - the backbone for the business to bid and serve live sport events year-round, growing from tens to hundreds of live events a year.
- Defined and executed the 3-year architectural roadmap for Prime Video's edge routing platform, securing alignment across 10+ orgs and 50+ internal service teams to establish a unified, company-wide routing standard.
- As tech lead grew a team of 8 owning the platform: millions of RPS, <10ms p99 latency and >99.99% availability across 8 AWS regions. Reduced customer-impacting incidents and out-of-hours paging; removed a 20-stakeholder approval path; maintained top-percentile team satisfaction ratings.
Prime Video code migration assistant
- Bootstrapped an agentic code-migration product for Prime Video, cutting time per migration from weeks to a day - adopted by 50+ teams and saving years of developer time.
- Designed and built the code-transform tool: orchestrated workflows of specialist agents, evals, re-usable prompt abstractions, custom tools and context management.
AWSSSMChaosRunner - open-source chaos testing framework for AWS
- Built the chaos testing framework that made fault injection cheap enough to run continuously in service pipelines - adopted by 200+ teams internally, including AWS EFS, Prime Video Profiles and Amazon's company-wide authz/authn service, preventing hundreds of customer-impacting incidents and saving years of developer time.
- Grew a two-service, team-level library into an Amazon-wide framework - extending AWS Systems Manager with CPU, memory and disk exhaustion, and dependency latency injection across EC2, ECS and Fargate, and integrating with Amazon's internal Resilience Score for tracking operational-readiness of services. Published an AWS blog post and presented at AWS re:Invent 2020.
- Sole owner and maintainer for 5 years alongside my primary role, with contributors from across Amazon. Received an above-and-beyond award from the VP of Prime Video.
Publications, talks and mentoring
- Authored Amazon's official guide for writing technical design documents, adopted by the central engineering training org and issued to new SDEs at onboarding.
- Authored three technical deep dives for the official AWS Open Source blog and Networking blog: Kotlin adoption, monitoring load balancers and chaos testing.
- Presented at AWS re:Invent 2020, twice at DevCon (the annual internal developer conference) and once at TestUnconference (internal testing-focused conference).
- Coached 15+ Amazon engineers for promotion from junior engineers to mid-level and mid-level to senior. Active interviewer on London hiring loops. Mentor in student outreach programs.
Software Development EngineerAmazon
- 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.
- Rearchitected 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.
Software EngineerStealth Startup
- Second engineering hire on a four-person founding team, building a photo-based social network for fashion shopping. Company wound down after angel funding ran out.
- Shipped the image vectorisation system to detect affiliate products in user images. Rearchitected the database layer (90% latency reduction).
Software EngineerMusixmatch
- First R&D hire. Bootstrapped the research platform for the world's largest lyrics database - timestamp alignment, lyrics-based music recommendation and automated improvements of user-annotated lyrics.
- Published viral data studies featured by news outlets, such as The Guardian. Developer evangelist for the company at 20+ hackathons across the US and EU.
Internships
- R&D Engineer TraineeYamaha Corporation
- Research InternMusixmatch
- Google Summer of Code InternMixxx DJ
- Google Summer of Code InternBeagleBoard.org Foundation
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
Skills
Java / KotlinAWSTypeScript / JSPythonDistributed SystemsOpen sourceAgentic productsRoadmapping & org chartersPostmortems & incident managementOncallPrototyping & productionisingCareer coaching at scale