# Palash Agarwal

> Let's build something.

Location: Berkeley, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/palash

I am driven by building meaningful products and developing great teams around them, not by the programming languages or technology being used. I am comfortable anywhere in the stack, across frontend, backend, infrastructure, data pipelines, experimentation, developer experience, and internal tools.

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer @ Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
Jan 2020 – Jan 2023 | Redwood City, California, United States
Founding engineer on the team for Along (https://www.along.org), a new product designed to build closer, more meaningful, teacher to student relationships.

I was responsible for a variety of core decisions and application components such as:
- Successfully co-leading a push to use GraphQL as the API surface for our server, guiding its implementation, and suporting other engineers onboarding onto this new stack.
- Building a cross platform and cross browser webcam React component, reliable video transcoding pipelines for the output, and a secure CDN for streaming smoothly to students who might have low bandwidth or small screen devices.
- Creating and maintaining our scripts for development environment setup, code generation, linting, continuous integration, and continuous deployment, across Github Actions, AWS, and Heroku.
- Using Terraform to setup all our basic infrastructure in AWS like domain names and DNS, user roles and IAM policies, RDS instances, email through SES, S3 buckets, etc.
- Setting up integrations, API wrappers, and best practices for A/B testing through providers like Google Optimize and Split.IO.

### Staff Software Engineer @ Chan Zuckerberg Initiative
Jan 2017 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area
As tech lead for the "Professional Development" team I:
- Developed tools to support in person and virtual teacher training activities, including an in product "Learning Space" with searchable content and assessments relevant to teachers in various phases of our program.
- Supported/advised other engineers in creating school and teacher level data dashboards to help administrators and teachers understand and improve their student outcomes.
- Continued scaling processes and automating edge cases for student/teacher account management and course enrollments.

As part of the infrastructure team, I suggested, created, and deployed key infrastructure including:
- Structured logging APIs and pipelines for transfer of that data into the warehouse.
- Widely adopted (internally) framework for systematic privacy checking during read and write operations.
- Modernization and rewrite of our development environments and devserver infrastructure inside AWS.
- Core abstractions for safe application level locking and "run exactly once" async jobs.
- Realistic fake data generation scripts to power development environments without PII.

### Staff Software Engineer @ Facebook
Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | Menlo Park, California, United States
Built tools, interfaces, and processes to help scale the Summit Learning Platform (https://www.summitlearning.org) from ~10 schools to 300+.

- Workflows for self serve admin, teacher and student account creation and management.
- Sync processes to continuously integrate classroom enrollment information from school information systems via the Clever API.
- Creation of roles and capabilities and privacy/visibility rules for each kind of user.

### Senior Software Engineer @ Facebook
Jan 2013 – Jan 2016 | Menlo Park, California, United States
Led development and growth of an advertiser marketing platform responsible for a sustained 5% lift in active advertising accounts (verified by holdout group) over multiple years.

- Tech lead the project over 2 years across ~5 engineers.
- Launched user facing campaigns on extremely high profile surfaces like the News Feed and Pages with billions of daily impressions.
- Advocated for and sustained strong experimentation culture and practices on the team. Built logging, data pipelines, and metrics, and integrated into company wide experimentation tools. 
- Worked cross functionally with PM/Marketing/Business teams across the company to make the platform self-service, train on the tool, and launch 100s of precisely targeted campaigns.

### Software Engineer @ Facebook
Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | Menlo Park, California, United States
Joined as one of 2 engineers on the "Boost Post" team and launched features that helped grow the product from $100k to $1B+ in annual revenue.

### Software Engineer Intern @ Facebook
Jan 2011 – Jan 2011 | Palo Alto, CA
Developed and deployed internal tools and ML models to improve Facebook application search rankings.

### MTS Intern @ VMware
Jan 2010 – Jan 2010 | Palo Alto, California, United States
Modified core VMWare hypervisor to support new AMD CPU hardware features for more efficient virtual machine memory management.


## Education
### BS in Computer Science
University of California, Berkeley
Jan 2008 – Jan 2012

### High School
The Harker School
Jan 2004 – Jan 2008


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/palasha

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