# Sunil Kamalakar > Engineer @ Apple Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/sunilkamalakar ## Work Experience ### Staff Engineer @ Apple Jan 2020 – Present ### Senior Engineering Manager @ Groupon Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 -Leading two data platform teams of 16+ software engineers including 2 engineering managers and senior individual contributors spread across geographies - US, Ireland & India -Data Pipeline Platform team provides tooling/platforms for pipeline orchestration (Airflow), compute technology (Spark on AWS EMR), self-serve data movement and data-quality measurement solutions with over 100+ customers (data engineering, data-science teams in the organization). -Data Curation Platform team provides a self-serve platform for onboarding and providing governed, high-quality curated/canonicalized data-sets consumable in streaming and batch fashion by 500+ customers (analysts, data-engineers and data-scientists across the organization). -Defined team vision, strategy, roadmap, cloud-migration charter and partnered with cross functional teams. Grew the team from 8 to 16 people, retained talent and promoted people. -Founded the Data Science Platform / Machine Learning Infrastructure team with ownership of home-grown on-premise ML systems and delivered a cloud migration strategy, implementation with AWS Sagemaker & MLFlow. -Evangelized and built the product roadmap for a feature-engineering platform ingesting and serving realtime & batch machine learning features for data-scientists. 10+ team adoption, 200+ features served in realtime (20K+ rps, 5ms tp99 latency) -Established working relationships between leadership, platform teams and stakeholders through open data-driven discussions, joint planning sessions and collaborative solutioning. ### Engineering Manager @ Groupon Jan 2016 – Jan 2018 | Palo Alto -Engineered and productionalized realtime streaming data pipelines and API’s serving internal and site-facing use-cases like widgets - “you recently viewed”, “X+ people viewed deal”, cookie-mapping service enhancing customer experience and bringing in revenue >$10M /year -Facilitated and led the compliance/GDPR features across a cross-functional team of 30+ engineers for the personalization track with on-time delivery with collaboration across product, program and compliance teams. -Collaborated with product management, operations and business/platform stakeholders in driving roadmap planning, feature deployments and migration effort. -Actively hired, mentored and grew the team from 4 to 8, including promoting team members. -Spearheaded the team to deliver a realtime key-value store solution with an active-active geo-redundant setup serving 100K+ rps with ~5ms tp99 latency along with managing project, dependencies, migration, timeline and agile processes. ### Software Engineer / Senior Software Engineer (SDE-II, SDE-III, SDE-IV) @ Groupon Jan 2013 – Jan 2016 | Palo Alto -Technical lead for a 3-member team re-architecting a realtime deal performance attribution pipeline & service for search & recommendation system providing the single most important feature for ranking deals. Implemented using Apache Storm, Cassandra, Redis and Dropwizard to process click-stream data with ~5 sec average latency. -Introduced a predictive pre-caching solution with Redis to scale out the HBase read traffic for high throughput email traffic, improving the read latency by 5X to 10ms at 20K rps and reducing infra costs by ~$400K per year. -Redesigned, developed & maintained a realtime push-marketing service scaling to sending 250+ million emails and 100+ million push-notifications daily to end-customers. Implemented using Java, Play Framework, RabbitMQ, Redis. -Designed and implemented a production system for Email Search to assist email campaign managers and customer service to self-service and debug email deliverability issues using Scala, Play Framework, Akka, Cassandra saving ~10k man-hours/year. ### Software Engineering Intern - Qualcomm Research @ Qualcomm Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 - Research and develop techniques for optimizing software integration between Python and C/C++ for the testing framework in the Networking LTE group. - Implemented a prototype using Cython and migrated sub-modules for the testing framework for a 2.5X runtime optimization ### Graduate Research Assistant @ Virginia Tech Jan 2012 – Jan 2013 | Blacksburg, Virginia, United States - Thesis: Specification as Automated Tests in Behavior-Driven Development, a framework for generating automated unit and acceptance tests based on natural language description of software behavior, using Java, NLP (Natural Language Processing), probabilistic analysis and automated code generation. - Research and develop software tools for characterizing and analyzing mutations in large-scale genomic data using Java, Perl at the Virginia Bioinformatics Institute. ### Software Engineer @ EMC Jan 2009 – Jan 2011 | Bengaluru, Karnataka - Design, develop and test EMC’s Cloud Operations Management software to provide an unified operational view of server, network, storage and virtualized infrastructure in the Cloud. - Engineered the agents and backend system using Java/J2EE and User-Interface using Adobe Flex SDK. Actively participated in customer deployments and triages of operational issues. ### Intern @ Gluster Jan 2009 – Jan 2009 ## Education ### Master's degree in Computer Science Virginia Tech ### Bachelor of Engineering (BE) in Computer Science Visvesvaraya Technological University ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/sunil-kamalakar-5a59a749 --- Source: https://flows.cv/sunilkamalakar JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/sunilkamalakar/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12