# Satbir Chahal

> Engineering - Software, Systems - Go | Kubernetes | Infra | DevOps Observability

Location: San Jose, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/satbir

Engineering systems to be cloud agnostic, performant, reliable, and observable. Current stack: Svelte, Go, Kubernetes, AWS/GCP/Azure

Programming Languages

Proficient: Go, Python, Typescript, Bash (Shell) 
Intermediate: Javascript, Perl
Working Knowledge (recent one-off fixes/features): Java, C, Lua, PHP

Data

SQL (PostgreSQL, MySQL, ClickHouseDB), Elasticsearch (ELK), Redis
Time-series databases (Prometheus, InfluxDB, TimescaleDB, VictoriaMetrics)
Monitoring: Telegraf, Datadog, Fluent Bit, Grafana Agent, Loki, Prometheus AlertManager
Streaming: Apache Pulsar, Kafka, RabbitMQ

Virtualization and Containerization

Orchestration: Kubernetes (EKS, AKS, GKE, k3s)
Hashicorp tools: Nomad, Consul, and Vault
VMWare, Hyper-V, Xen, and KVM hypervisors for image creation and deployments
Public Cloud: AWS (proficient), Azure and GCP (intermediate)

General

Linux (compiled custom kernel for platform)
Configuration Management: Terraform and Packer (previously Ansible and Salt)
Jenkins (via Jenkinsfiles), Gitlab CI, ArgoCD and Workflows, Multi-stage docker builds
Web Frameworks: Flask

Open Source Contributions

Update Pulsar to more accurately load private key from PEM file: https://github.com/apache/pulsar/pull/6691
Update InfluxDB’s Terraform provider to continue to provision if using self-signed certs: https://github.com/terraform-providers/terraform-provider-influxdb/pull/12
Initial implementation PoC for dogstatsd events within Telegraf: https://github.com/influxdata/telegraf/issues/5224

## Work Experience
### Software Engineer @ Nextdoor
Jan 2023 – Present

### Principal (Founding) Engineer @ OpsVerse
Jan 2021 – Jan 2023 | San Francisco Bay Area

### Principal Engineer - DevOps @ Balbix
Jan 2020 – Jan 2021 | San Jose, California, United States

### Senior Staff Engineer - Infrastructure Software and Devops @ Petuum, Inc.
Jan 2019 – Jan 2020
* Wrote several infrastructure tools (Go/Python) which include managing (CRUD) kubernetes clusters on-demand, production environments and custom product dependency branching
* Brought up our production environment for our SaaS offering from scratch: from network setup, cluster provisioning, logging (ELK) and monitoring (Prometheus and OpsGenie) to deployments
* Set up an Apache Pulsar cluster with geo-replication enabled to facilitate I/O data pipeline with customer
* Introduced Infrastructure-as-Code (IAC) and GitOps principles for both development and production
* Migrated our Gitlab instance to self-hosted, confirmed CI/CD pipelines worked, and maintained critical infrastructure for continuous integration, including artifact repos (yum, npm, pypi, helm, and docker), Consul, Sentry, TimescaleDB/Postgres, etc

### Senior Software Engineer - DevOps @ SAP Ariba
Jan 2016 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area
* Helped modernize the in-house monitoring solution by utilizing open-source tools (Telegraf, InfluxDB)
* Introduced Git workflow with Jenkins pipeline jobs/tests for continuous integration and deployment to staging environments for Ops teams
* Developed infrastructure tool (in Go) to set up bare-metal production environments for our microservices applications (from OS installation to container/docker orchestration clusters like Nomad, Consul, and Vault)
* Instrumented monitoring scripts (both existing and new) to send metrics via StatsD in Go, Shell, and Perl
* Open source contribution for Terraform’s InfluxDB provider and spearheaded path for Telegraf input plugin OSS contributions

### Senior Software Engineer (Virtualization Lead) @ Barracuda (NYSE: CUDA)
Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco Bay Area
* Worked on Platform team build/release/tools infrastructure to ensure all security and network appliances had a corresponding and functional virtual image with the ability to run on various hypervisors (VMware, Hyper-V, Xen)
* Led development to port virtual appliances to the public cloud; namely, Amazon’s AWS, Microsoft’s Azure, and VMware’s vCloud Air
* Helped stabilize the internal virtual machine build system by introducing versioning to the system for simple rollbacks and enforcing staging changes beforehand
* Compiled and oversaw the upgrading virtual machine kernels to more modern Linux kernels to take advantage of newer drivers and features
* Developed tools to automatically deploy, monitor, list, stop and remove virtual machines from public cloud platforms in order to cut compute costs

### Software Engineer, Platform Team @ Barracuda (NYSE: CUDA)
Jan 2012 – Jan 2014

### Perl Developer @ FriendFinder Networks, Inc.
Jan 2010 – Jan 2012 | Sunnyvale, CA
* As a developer for the marketing technology department, owned programs that handled all affiliate (primary source of traffic driven to the FriendFinder family of sites) data, stats, and payouts
* Developed modules with high integrity for click, order, and member signup tracking of affiliates (MySQL backend)
* Programs written to normalize stats to calculate semi-monthly affiliate earnings on their traffic for check and payout processing
* Handled requests from internal marketing department for stat analysis (e.g., conversion rates, click comparisons, etc) with CGI and mod_perl front-facing technologies
* Built tools for affiliates to view more granularized stats like how much of traffic is coming from mobile devices, geo, etc.

### Information Systems Programmer @ InfoImage, Inc
Jan 2008 – Jan 2010 | Menlo Park, CA
* Wrote processing scripts to manipulate bank and credit statement data for core processes, fetch data from client servers, and analyze various confidential files for validation
* Developed a “parallel” environment to mirror our production systems processing environment; team had a staging system to test before releasing code to production.
* Helped create process for disk PDF archival of service, requiring CSV, XML parsing, and HTML generation in Perl
* Developed and maintained scripts that backup content and processing servers (sync) from Menlo Park, CA to a remote site in Texas for disaster recovery compliance
* Documentation of procedures on corporate wiki (JSPWiki)

### Technical Assistant / Software Engineer I @ gBox
Jan 2008 – Jan 2008 | Cupertino, CA
* Wrote back-end Perl scripts (for content), which included pattern matching (regular expressions), DBI (MySQL connectivity), and content processing (ingestion into our system) in a Linux (CentOS) environment
* Fixed bugs (Bugzilla tracker tool) and added features to Java-based (JSP, Tomcat, XSLT) catalog pre-processing system of new content which came in via major record labels (e.g. Universal, Time Warner, etc.)
* Responsible for making sure all content is pushed to Production servers (Linux environment) to get tracks and albums live on gbox.com
* Worked with two developers to create a program that streamlined all processes needed to run content from reception (fetching the content major labels uploaded) to release (making that content live on public portal)
* Documentation of procedures on corporate wiki (PmWiki)

### IT Summer Intern - Web Development @ BD Biosciences
Jan 2007 – Jan 2007 | San Jose, CA
* Overhaul of existing BD Biosciences Intranet IT site via (1) consolidating all IT information and (2) designing a new, user-friendly site for use by BD employees – cutting down on help desk calls
* Added new “Map a Printer” function allowing employees to click on printer locations from building specs on web and have printer conveniently map to their systems – done via a simple VBScript script on Windows XP
* Assisted network engineer with script to update print servers to which all facility printers connect
* Used trouble ticket system from Peregrine to respond to help


## Education
### BS in Computer Science
San Jose State University


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

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Source: https://flows.cv/satbir
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/satbir/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-11