prajna kandarpa

professional summary

Software engineering leader with deep knowledge of modern software systems with fully automated build and release processes, full stack and machine learning engineer recruitment, mentoring and retainment strategies.

Hired, mentored, retained and led engineering teams (full-stack, machine learning and quality assurance) of sizes 4-22 people in consumer and enterprise software product companies with multiple thousand (lakhs) active users.

Cares deeply about the professional and personal growth of team members, with regular 1:1s, monthly meets with interactive surveys, quizzes and fun events. From a software development perspective, I help create standardised processes for a product’s Software Development Lifecycle (SDLC) by working closely with stakeholders in engineering and product teams.

people management

From an employee and people management purview, collected anonymised feedback on many aspects of each employee’s experience, gather group trends in feedback, share them publicly and use the insights to drive process changes, identify bottlenecks and resolve technical/personal and other challenges faced by engineering teams.

software development lifecycle

Deep knowledge of SDLC infrastructure setup - CI/CD systems, Code health scanning, code and container security scanning, unit test coverage checks, automated integration tests and more. Regularly reviews code being written by the team, helps setup and determine architectural design specifications through collaborative reviews with tech leads and engineering managers.

software security

Made significant contributions to set up processes around application security, container security assessment of software products using third party security vendors, CI/CD based security scans, and regular reviews + remediation strategies.

organisational impact

Aligns with organisational and business goals and drive engineering teams to deliver successful products and projects that involve standard full stack components (web apps, mobile apps, distributed backend), all deployed in a cloud native manner with error traceability and observability built in from day one. Products built by engineering teams I’ve led have earned their respective organisations revenue to the tune of $30m+ in the past 5 years.