Eakan Gopalakrishnan
Senior Engineering Leader
An engineering leader with a proven track record of empowering teams to deliver high-quality software solutions. Proficient in building high performing teams, driving technical excellence and delivering value iteratively.
🧑💻 Professional Experience
- Established the Quality Engineering Team, enabled the delivery of the first Journey Testing capability that led to a reduction of incidents by 20%.
- Scaled the team of Infrastructure SREs to productionize the central application deployment platform, reducing retailer environment bootstrapping time by 97%.
- Scaled offshore teams for the Managed Infrastructure Migration program to consolidate 90% of Retail applications into the central platform.
- Facilitated the first table-top Disaster Recovery exercise for the Core Billing Pipeline and set up a play book for running this annually to be compliant with ISO27001
- Improved confidence of SREs in 24/7 on-call through Paper Game days, resulting in 100% sign-up for Out of hours on-call.
- Restructured the squad for efficiency, creating the Platform Engineering team.
- Delivered seamless integration of Claims and Finance at CFC and improved efficiency of the financial reconciliation by 7x.
- Led the delivery of audited self-service capabilities to replace repetitive data correction/reporting tasks and improved efficiency of IT support operations by 4x.
- Established the team and worked on delivering the award-winning Cyber Response App with our partner, Software Mind.
- Developed a simple feature toggle system to decouple deployments and releases.
- Drove adoption of the following through workshops: Domain Driven Design & C4 diagrams, Event Storming, Continuous Integration using trunk-based development and feature toggles.
- Led the delivery of several user experience improvements, focussing on the application’s responsiveness for global users, reducing application response times by more than 80%.
- Re-architected the core application in order to decouple concerns, enabling contributors to the application targeting different client groups - internal & external, to make changes with little or no coordination, thereby reducing incidents in production by 90%.
- Led the migration of source code and deployment pipelines for all teams of Content Management Tools from Perforce to Git thereby improving developer experience.
- Collaborated with teams globally to plan releases and ensure 24/7 support for the systems and coordinate incident management.
- Re-architected the central content integration notification platform to cope with newer logical data clusters, enabling it to tackle 50% more notifications per day.
- Learned front end development to modernise the web application’s user interface - improving load times by 10x for users in APAC.
- Researched and implemented the most optimal database sharding strategy to ensure ~5ms data fetches from the proprietary column store database.
- Migrated the proprietary object-oriented database and all related data update systems to HP’s distributed column store database, Vertica to improve daily data update speeds by 90%.
- Developed several PL/SQL plugins for British Telecom’s Billing and Rating system - to cater for Contract rental customers, Revenue assurance and billing post processor.
- Supported end-to-end tests of customer journey by building relationships with colocated teams, and reduced issue resolution times from weeks to days.
- Won multiple awards for being a high performing graduate developer - Cookie and Star Performer.
- Topped the graduate training program.
🧑🎓 Education
👨🏫 Projects (done voluntarily outside work hours)
- Reduced Engineering Manager toil by 5 times.
- Solo experiment during Firebreak week at Kaluza.
- Being used by managers at Kaluza to fill on-call payments monthly.
- Powered Hugo static site generator.
- Multiple modifications to standard HugoPaperMod theme.
- Multiple courses available for free or donate if you can basis.
- A tutorial that helped junior developers where I worked at the time, learn API versioning in .NET.
- Another tutorial to help upskill junior developers where I worked then on Azure Cloud Services.
- Provided a practical session that reduced the confusion for engineers around git fundamentals - like rebase and merge.
- The gist of the many things one will find in EF Core that wasn't available in EF on .NET Framework.
- Contributed bug fixes
- Helped devs at CFC Underwriting learn more about Azure Logic Apps
- Challenges and solutions in C# for coding interview preparation from leetcode, hackerrank, geekforgeeks, codility, etc