# Chai Varier

> Software Engineer @ YouTube | Musician 🎷

Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/chai

Hey there! I'm a Software Engineer at YouTube (Google) on the Commerce User Experiences team, helping drive $14B+ in annual revenue by building seamless billing and checkout experiences for YouTube's paid products, serving 2B+ MAUs across multiple surfaces on web and mobile devices.

Prior to YouTube, I worked on the Analytics, Logging, and Experimentation team at Google. There, I worked on native Android libraries and data pipelines for surfacing core system health metrics for 1st party Google mobile apps (Maps, Search, Photos, Gmail, Drive, etc.) at petabyte scale, driving Google-wide improvements.

As a graduate of University of Waterloo's prestigious Software Engineering program, I gathered a wealth of experience throughout my six co-ops at companies such as Snap, Yahoo, and CoreLogic.

Outside of tech, I'm an active performing and recording jazz/lofi/funk/R&B saxophonist in the SF Bay Area, with 600k+ streams on music platforms: 

https://open.spotify.com/artist/4BtpG8zMdLLQJZ6W5jKjex?si=zEUN3pJfSvGMP8WMPNIQHA

Reach me at chaiv@google.com.

## Work Experience
### Software Engineer @ YouTube
Jan 2023 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area
YouTube Commerce - Billing Core (Full Stack).

Designed, implemented end-to-end, and launched the V2 YouTube frontend Checkout API - powering cart rendering and transaction handling at ~100 QPS, driving $14B+ in annual revenue across 125M+ subscribers for products such as YouTube TV, Primetime Channels, and Channel Memberships. This API uses a modernized catalog model and pricing database, resulting in:

➢ 94% reduction in peak error rate, significantly improving system reliability.
➢ 5 FTEQ/year in engineering velocity and maintenance savings, enabled by reusable modules and reduced code duplication.
➢ 5.3% increase in Sunday Ticket add-on adoption, supporting the US-wide rollout of installment plans and driving monetization.
➢ Scaling of iOS purchase-enabled channels from 4k to over 1 million, driving massive expansion of YouTube Commerce's ecosystem
➢ 19.7% increase in gross revenue and 11.1% growth in purchases globally across all markets for new-to-iOS channels

### Software Engineer @ Google
Jan 2022 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area
Core - ALEX (Analytics, Logging, and Experimentation). 

Worked on native Android libraries and data pipelines for surfacing core system health metrics for 1st party Google mobile apps (Maps, Search, Photos, Gmail, Drive, etc.) at petabyte scale, driving Google-wide improvements impacting over 3B+ MAUs.

### Software Engineer @ Aspect Development
Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | Toronto, Ontario, Canada
➢ Spearheaded the migration of Boston Dynamics’ primary build system from GN to Bazel by implementing reusable rules for tasks such as generating PEX binaries to be deployed onto the Spot robot and building Python wheels for streamlining in-house dependencies

➢ Implemented an algorithm with TypeScript and Node.js to automatically find and resolve dead links in crawled webpages by parsing and modifying the DOM of dynamically generated HTML

➢ Contributed to Google’s open source repos for Bazel (https://github.com/bazelbuild/bazel/pull/14230) and Bazel build rules for Go (https://github.com/bazelbuild/rules_go/pulls?q=author%3Acvarier+)

➢ Wrote an algorithm in Go for Aspect’s CLI which simpifies Bazel builds by discovering and suggesting common local targets (https://aspect.build/)

### Software Engineer @ Yahoo
Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | Toronto, Ontario, Canada
➢ Contributed to an increase in revenue generated from clicks of affiliate partner deals in the Yahoo! Mail Android app by implementing deep linking to native 3rd party apps

➢ Worked on a redesign of the shopping feed view - improved cold start time by implementing a local asynchronous SQLite worker to fetch cached emails

### Software Engineer, Build Systems @ Snap Inc.
Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | Los Angeles Metropolitan Area
➢ Unified the build systems for instrumentation tests on the Snapchat app from a mixture of Buck and Gradle to only Bazel, achieving a 70% reduction in incremental build times, saving over 15 mins of CPU time on average per CI build in production

➢ Implemented a CRON scheduled CI pipeline in Python with Jenkins for catching build-time and test-time regressions in the Snapchat Android production codebase, leading to the timely discovery and resolution of concurrency and linkage errors

➢ Enhanced Snap's test automation client API, written in Kotlin, with asynchronous callbacks for polling and reporting the status of instrumentation tests; using these callbacks, refactored the API, leading to an 80% reduction in LOC

➢ Implemented a CLI client in Kotlin for invoking instrumentation tests remotely through Snap's test automation framework, utilizing the Spoon test runner

### Software Engineer, Infrastructure & Tooling @ Snap Inc.
Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | Greater Los Angeles Area
➢ Engineered a backend service in Python and Java with Spring, and a CI pipeline in Bash with Jenkins to manage app size quotas on the Snapchat Android app

➢ Implemented an analysis tool in Kotlin for calculating app size artifacts from the DEX file tree of an APK, using iterative depth-first search

➢ Created visualizations and dynamic dashboards in Looker through embedded SQL queries to a BigQuery database, streaming data from the CI pipeline; subsequently used these to continuously monitor app size quotas across more than 20 product teams

### Software Engineer, Android Mail @ Yahoo
Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Sunnyvale, California
➢ Wrote and delivered features and bug fixes for the next generation of the Yahoo! Mail Android app, encompassing UI and performance updates, redefining the experience of over 22M daily active users 

    ▻	Improved accuracy of the pinch-to-zoom gesture on the message viewer by 80% through implementing a custom OnScaleGestureListener

    ▻ Received press coverage for implementing a new theme selection UI, using modular components on top of a Flux-based architecture 

    ▻ From scratch, designed and implemented reusable widgets, layouts, and views in Kotlin using affine transforms and linear shaders

    ▻ Streamlined the message viewer UI with a custom RecyclerView using the ViewHolder pattern, leveraging Android Jetpack components

### Android Engineer @ CoreLogic
Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | Toronto, Canada Area
➢ Developed new features and updates for Virgin Mobile Android application (My Benefits) as lead developer, serving over 1.6M registered users:

    ▻ Prepared and delivered project milestone presentations to Virgin Mobile product managers during bi-weekly Agile sprint reviews

    ▻ Implemented SSL pinning to protect against man-in-the-middle attack techniques such as ARP cache poisoning and DNS spoofing

    ▻ Achieved a 40% reduction in application size by applying code obfuscation and minification techniques with Proguard

➢ Developed and shipped new features and bug fixes for IoT Android application, We-Connect, serving over 200K active users:

    ▻ Achieved a 75% reduction in crashes and ANRs per 1000 devices after patching a critical hotfix concerning race conditions

    ▻ Wrote and integrated XMPP command infrastructure on top of a secure Bluetooth network communication layer to enable interoperability amongst mobile client versions

### Android Developer @ OANDA
Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | Toronto, Canada Area
➢  Developed and shipped new features for the fxTrade Android App, serving over 100K users:

    ▻ Architected and implemented a dynamic theme management engine in Kotlin, Java and XML, enabling the user to seamlessly transition between themes at runtime

    ▻ Produced and landed over 60 differential revisions for bug fixes and new features using Phabricator's Arcanist while following the Kanban method

    ▻ Increased app usage by 20% through shipping a trading performance tool which provides insight into the user's trading strategies

    ▻ Applied knowledge of Android core libraries to diagnose and debug stability issues across all Android versions

➢  Independently built prototype AR trading app using the ARCore and OpenGL ES Android libraries (available at github.com/Cvarier/ARTrade)

### Software Engineer @ Serind Labs
Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Toronto, Canada Area
➢  Wrote and deployed OAuth secured REST endpoints for user authentication in Node.js and MongoDB

➢  Developed and shipped features as lead developer for Pineapple and WRKS Android apps via Google Play:

    ▻ Discovered and fixed over 250 existing bugs while following the Scrum Agile methodology

    ▻ Collaborated with design team using Sketch, InVision and Zeplin apps in order to design and implement custom Android Views and UI assets

    ▻ Integrated credit card and bank payment functionality with Stripe Android SDK to facilitate smoother client transactions

    ▻ Implemented social media sign-up and log-in flows with Facebook and LinkedIn SDKs to simplify the account creation process and improve the user's experience

### Computational Fluid Dynamics Engineer @ Dawson College
Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | Montreal, Canada Area
➢  Built CFD application in Java which solves the Winslow partial differential equations:

    ▻ Devised numerical algorithm which calculates grid line skewness with 98% average accuracy

    ▻ Produced model for grid quality analysis using tensor mathematics and differential geometry

➢ Independently wrote research paper providing a mathematical analysis of the problem and proposed algorithm

### Software Engineer @ Alphamantis Technologies
Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Montreal, Canada Area
➢  Developed a sports event timing application for Android (Alphamantis EventWatch), featuring real-time broadcasting of events over Wi-Fi/LAN, event geo-tagging through GPS, event storage via SQLite databases and customized preferences

    ▻ Published the app on the Google Play Store

➢  Acquired grounding in software architecture and network protocols including TCP and UDP


## Education
### BSE in Honours Software Engineering
University of Waterloo
Jan 2016 – Jan 2021

### DEC (CEGEP) in First Choice Pure and Applied Science
Dawson College
Jan 2014 – Jan 2016

### IBMYP in Secondary School - IB Program (Enriched)
Lakeside Academy
Jan 2009 – Jan 2014


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/chaitanyavarier
- GitHub: https://github.com/Cvarier
- Website: https://stackoverflow.com/users/2671503/cvarier
- Website: https://chaitanyavarier.com/

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Source: https://flows.cv/chai
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/chai/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-22