# Akarsh Dang > Senior Backend Engineer | Distributed Systems & Reliability | Data Infrastructure | AWS Redshift Control Plane Location: San Francisco, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/akarshdang Backend Engineer with 8 years of experience building and operating large scale distributed systems, including nearly 6 years at Amazon Web Services on the Redshift Control Plane. I specialize in platform and control plane services where reliability, fault tolerance, and safe system evolution are critical. At AWS, I led and contributed to systems that operate across multiple regions, supporting high availability workloads with strict reliability requirements. My work has focused on designing systems that operate correctly under failure, managing complex state transitions, and enabling seamless infrastructure evolution at scale. I enjoy working across the full lifecycle of a system, from initial architecture and design to long term operation in production. This includes building APIs for global customers, improving system resilience, and ensuring services remain reliable as they scale. Before AWS, I spent 2 years at Samsung Research building backend systems for high availability applications. I take strong ownership of problems end to end and enjoy collaborating across teams to translate complex requirements into scalable, reliable systems. I’m particularly interested in infrastructure, reliability, and distributed systems challenges, and enjoy connecting with others working in this space. ## Work Experience ### SDE II @ Amazon Web Services (AWS) Jan 2021 – Present | Palo Alto, California, United States - Contributed to the design and development of Redshift Multi-AZ, enabling cross-AZ cluster availability with seamless failover; independently rolled out to 15+ regions, improving service SLA from 99.9% → 99.99%. - Drove adoption of Multi-AZ, resulting in 3,900+ clusters since launch; built and maintained QuickSight dashboards to track usage and operational health, delivering actionable insights to leadership. - Owned AWS CloudFormation integration for Redshift Control Plane, enabling infrastructure-as-code deployment for Multi-AZ and multiple Redshift Serverless features. - Migrated 160+ customer event notifications to a unified API layer through phased rollouts, reducing redundancy and simplifying cross-service operations. ### Software Development Engineer @ Amazon Web Services (AWS) Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | Palo Alto, California, United States ### Graduate Research Assistant @ Information Sciences Institute Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | Marina Del Rey Worked on the THOR (Text-enabled Humanitarian Operations in Real-time) project, funded under DARPA’s LORELEI program. For the purpose of research, we used the critical data sent via social media channels such as Twitter. Whilst tweets frequently contain non-critical information, at times of crisis the data shared by those caught up in an emerging incident can inform emergency services and humanitarian aid, providing clues about where to focus rescue efforts. - Constructed and analyzed the graph generated from the twitter dataset of the aftermath of Nepal earthquake. - Performed clustering to create different situational clusters in order to prioritize which situation should be tackled first. - Created a streaming docker container which handles incoming stream of situational messages and modify clusters on runtime. ### Backend Software Engineer Intern @ Sumo Logic Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 - Designed and implemented event-enriching lookup feature for the Cloud SIEM product which allows a user(security analyst) to gain deeper contextual insight into their application's security events. - The feature allows a user to configure a set of lookup tables and then, during the investigation, perform lookup of the specific parts of the incoming events in the configured set of lookup tables. ### Software Engineer @ Samsung Electronics Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | Noida Area, India - Developed new features along with code maintenance and optimization of pre-loaded Gallery application and Video Player Application. - Collaborated with Samsung HQ on feature development as well as OS upgrade bring-up activities in android smartphone and tablet devices. ### Summer Intern @ Bhabha Atomic Research Centre Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Mumbai Area, India Created a summer project in Machine Learning & Automation Section Lab, BARC. Designed user interface for keeping a track of all people that checked in during visiting hours. Resulted in achieving 100% error free data entry for database creation by eliminating the need for syntax definitions. ### Android Developer @ Ducat Education Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | Noida Area, India To understand the fundamental concepts of Android App Development as well as the structure and different entry points of any android application. The Sudoku application was designed to be controlled by finger and was preloaded with 60 puzzles in 3 difficulty levels. ### Java Trainee @ Ducat Education Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 ### Java Trainee @ Apex Training Institute Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 ## Education ### Master of Science - MS in Computer Science University of Southern California ### Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) in Computer Science National Institute of Technology Jamshedpur ### Ryan International School, Ghaziabad ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/akarsh-dang - Portfolio: https://www.akarshdang.com/ --- Source: https://flows.cv/akarshdang JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/akarshdang/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-18