Eakan Gopalakrishnan
Senior Engineering Leader
Engineering Leader with two decades of experience navigating the evolution of high-scale digital platforms in Energy, Insurance, and Finance. I specialize in bridging deep platform infrastructure with customer-facing product delivery: scaling global engineering units and driving operational efficiencies. I lead by operationalizing a true 'You Build It, You Run It' culture, fostering autonomous teams that treat reliability as a core feature.
🧑💻 Professional Experience
- Established and scaled new global delivery teams to design and deploy Kaluza’s next-generation pricing engine, enabling energy retailers to configure and package complex energy and non-energy product bundles.
- Established the Infrastructure Platform and Quality Engineering Teams, 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 productionise the central application deployment platform, reducing retailer environment bootstrapping time by 97%.
- Established and scaled offshore teams and oversaw the Managed Infrastructure Migration program to consolidate the billing platform's microservices ecosystem into the central platform, achieving an estimated cost savings of around ÂŁ2.4 million per annum.
- 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 Reliability squad for efficiency, creating the Platform Engineering team, reducing meetings and narrowing focus on the most valuable work.
- 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 (voluntary initiatives at work and beyond)
- Eliminated engineering manager toil by scrapping the need to manually calculate on-call payments monthly for their teams to fill finance team's payments spreadsheet.
- Open-sourced the project to encourage contributions from other engineering managers.
- Eliminated engineering manager toil by scrapping the need to manually calculate on-call payments monthly for their teams to fill finance team's payments spreadsheet.
- Open-sourced the project to encourage contributions from other engineering managers.
- Powered by Hugo static site generator.
- Multiple modifications to standard HugoPaperMod theme.
- Sharing lessons and courses for free.
- A tutorial that helped junior developers 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