# Prasanna Sukumar

> Principal Engineer at Workday

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/prasannasukumar

•	Software development and management experience, specializing in software for FPGAs, network and application performance management and network modeling.
•	Led the development of network performance management solutions for various Government agencies
•	Co-inventor of a patent in the area of application characterization and another for a database proxy

## Work Experience
### Principal Engineer @ Workday
Jan 2021 – Present | Pleasanton, California, United States
Driving towards >99.9% availability and improved customer experience
Scaling application performance and building resilient architecture
Mentoring teams and establishing technical best practices

### Head Of Engineering @ rENIAC, Inc
Jan 2017 – Jan 2021
𝗘𝗻𝗴𝗶𝗻𝗲𝗲𝗿𝗶𝗻𝗴 𝗹𝗲𝗮𝗱𝗲𝗿𝘀𝗵𝗶𝗽 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝘁𝗲𝗮𝗺 𝗺𝗮𝗻𝗮𝗴𝗲𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁

Directed a remote team of 20 engineers building, testing and releasing cutting edge FPGA products for cloud (AWS, Azure and GCP) and on-premise deployments.

Implemented a process of continuous improvement, establishing rigorous QA standards, configuration management best practices, coding guidelines and fostering accountability, which resulted in improved product quality and predictable delivery schedules.

Provided hands-on technical leadership by adding key features, optimizing performance, developing specialized testing utilities (e.g., multithreaded socket program for product testing) and utilizing industry-standard benchmark tests to quantify performance benefits.

### Director of Engineering @ rENIAC, Inc
Jan 2014 – Jan 2017
𝗣𝗿𝗼𝗱𝘂𝗰𝘁 𝗱𝗲𝘃𝗲𝗹𝗼𝗽𝗺𝗲𝗻𝘁 𝗮𝗻𝗱 𝗱𝗲𝗹𝗶𝘃𝗲𝗿𝘆

Oversaw the development and publication of two high-performance data acceleration products on the AWS Marketplace (a software database proxy and an FPGA row cache accelerator for Cassandra) capable of delivering 4-6x improvement in the query throughput.

Managed the proof-of-concept (PoC) lifecycle for prospective customers; delivered product installations that could show the potential benefits in the customer environment.

Managed the end-to-end development of an on-premise, FPGA proxy for NoSQL databases. Drove critical architectural changes to core components, reducing FPGA area utilization and improving query throughput at consistently lower latencies. Established a methodology to benchmark the proxy against target databases.

Led the development of an FPGA real-time bid gateway for a major Ad-Tech client. Made critical bug fixes. Partnered closely with the customer to establish performance benchmarks, qualify the bid gateway using specialized equipment (Maxwell Pro for testing the TCP engine for RFC compliance) and created a production rollout plan.

### Technical Director @ Riverbed Technology
Jan 2012 – Jan 2014
Modeling & simulation (M&S) projects: Managed the development of a custom M&S application for the US Department of Defense (DoD). Studied the impact of IP header compression on performance of tactical radios by developing custom simulation models. Added support for compressing TCP headers.

### Software Engineer @ OPNET Technologies, Inc
Jan 1998 – Jan 2012
Mobile app prototype: Developed a prototype iPad app for a common operational picture (COP) solution. App displayed the network on a map, allowing an operator to navigate to problem areas quickly; displayed alerts when thresholds were exceeded. Prototype was demonstrated at OPNETWORK 2011.

COP solution: Led the development of a COP solution for a US Government agency. Coordinated the product development done by two teams in separate locations. The product obtained device configuration and metrics from the live network and rendered it on a map, enabling operators to identify problems quickly.

Application characterization module: Designed and developed a set of APIs for querying an application model that was built with OPNET’s ACE Analyst. The APIs provided details on the transactions and their relationships. The APIs were used by OPNET’s simulation engines to model the application performance.


## Education
### MS in Computer Science
The University of Toledo

### BE in Computer Science
RVS College of Engineering and Technology

### High School
Campion Higher Secondary School


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

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Source: https://flows.cv/prasannasukumar
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/prasannasukumar/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12