Surya Vakkalanka
Advisor and Founding Member at blindfold.ai
Surya Vakkalanka
Advisor and Founding Member at blindfold.ai
San Jose, California
Overview
Work Experience
Advisor and Founding Member
2023 - Current
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Founding VP of Engineering (Product and Innovation)
2016
Leading Product/Mobile Engineering and Innovation at eightfold.ai. As one of the Founding Engineers, built and scaled the product from the ground up to Series-E stage with $2B+ valuation and repeat enterprise customers. Helped scale the organization from 4 employees to about 400 in 4 years. Instrumental in board meetings to help define the product strategy, go to market strategy and shaping company culture. Helped build the Product, Engineering and Design teams from the ground up. About eightfold.ai - we are disrupting the $400B global recruiting industry via a AI powered people intelligence platform that helps companies 1) hire best-fit talent quickly 2) understand employee insights 3) facilitate internal job transfers and many more.
Director of Engineering (Cloud Platform)
2014 - 2016
Engineering Strategy and Execution, Engineering Management, Hands-on Coding - Led Platform Engineering for Samsung Plus (personalized customer experience and loyalty app with over ~8M MAU and growing) and Core Platform Services for Samsung eCommerce app - Led a geo-distributed team, co-located across Mountain View, Dallas, Sao Paulo, Seattle and New Jersey - Architected and developed data-driven microservice APIs using Node.js, Kubernetes, Docker, Cassandra, ElasticSearch, SQS, and an array of AWS solutions - Built a dynamic user profile and personalized content recommendation platform that powered self-service customer support tools and e-commerce applications for Samsung.com and Samsung Mobile apps - Built 10 foot TV experiences using Node.js, MongoDB, React.js, Angular.js, and AWS for Samsung Smart TVs - Led a team that built and maintained the cloud infrastructure and APIs for Samsung's 19" Galaxy View tablet
Founding Engineer @ Terrain (Android Launcher, acquired by Samsung)
2013 - 2014
- Built Terrain, a smart home screen for Android that organized and streamlined the default Android experience by making everything you cared about quick and easy to access - Pitched Terrain to Samsung CTO and facilitated acquisition discussions - Terrain was the first start-up backed by Samsung Accelerator (now Samsung Next) and acquired by Samsung http://terrainhome.com http://samsungaccelerator.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-msK5k_2Ko
Principal Architect (WebOS, acquired by LG Silicon Valley Lab)
2012 - 2013
Led the design, architecture and implementation of a cross-platform, open source JavaScript Framework called EnyoJS. Started by HP webOS, Enyo was eventually acquired by LG Silicon Valley Labs http://enyojs.com
Principal Architect
2011 - 2012
- Worked closely with the Founder and CPO of ServiceNow to rearchitect their UI to scale - Instrumental in building the San Jose Engineering team from the ground up
Founder @ Multiple Startups
2010 - 2012
pixawe.com - Built a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor for rapidly building mobile optimized web applications. hutke.com - Built a social mood-based music streaming app for iOS and Android and grew the user base to over 300,000 DAU. iPhone app was featured in the Top 100 world-wide music apps in the Apple App Store. During this fantastic journey, I negotiated content partnership deals and led content acquisition strategies besides driving innovative monetization efforts to generate a recurring revenue stream from ads and memberships.
Mobile Architect
2010 - 2011
Architected and developed a suite of mobile apps used by internal retail (Apple Store) employees besides mobilizing a suite of internal BI (Business Intelligence) desktop applications for the iPad and iPhone. Designed and implemented a geo-spatial (heat-mapping) solution using Google/Yahoo! Maps APIs for visualizing key CORDA business intelligence reports while leading a team of offshore software engineers based out of India.
Sr. Product Manager and Architect (Video platform)
2006 - 2010
- Led a product line representing over $12 million in annual revenue. - Enabled Yahoo! properties including News, Sports, Finance and Movies to serve video ads and generate additional revenues by replacing legacy video players with video-ad-supported players. - Reduced the time-to-market by 60% for custom video player deployments by launching a self-service tool for customizing and managing video player instances across Yahoo!. - Led market research on video traffic patterns, user demographics and video viewership statistics. - Evangelized platform capabilities by building demo apps and hosting technology summits and internal hack-day events and developed award-winning ideas on various internal hack-day events. - Developed scalable RESTful web-services for serving Yahoo! Video metadata and architected a self-service tool for content publishers to manage their daily video workflow needs. - Developed a proprietary CMS tool for editorially managing videos featured by video.yahoo.com. - Led a Front-End Engineering team for globalizing video.yahoo.com into 14 countries and languages.
Director Software Engineering
2000 - 2006
ZL (ZipLip) develops software for mid-large enterprises (primarily financial and health-care industries) for turn-key e-mail solutions such as email security, archival, discovery and SEC compliance. During the 6 years at ZipLip, I wore several hats in the company. I started with hands-on development and quickly grew to the Director of Engineering role. Over my tenure, I enabled ZL as the solution of choice for major partners, resellers in the US, Japan and Korea. Also architected and Product-Managed multiple versions (web and mobile) of ZL’s application suite, developed content-analysis tools for classifying, storing, indexing and retrieving millions of email messages efficiently.