# Sunny Dhama

> Staff Software Engineer, Distributed Systems at Illumio

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

I build distributed systems that don’t fall apart at scale.
Currently a Staff Engineer at Illumio, I’m architecting cloud-native observability infrastructure for 4,000+ enterprise customers — multi-cloud, event-driven, built to handle the kind of scale where a bad design decision costs you at 3am.
Before that, I led an 8-engineer team to ship 4 microservices in 4 months, cut policy computation latency by ~80%, and replaced a mess of 20 redundant in-memory caches with a clean Redis layer. Then evaluated and migrated to DragonflyDB for 4x throughput. I also filed a patent for an NL→KQL AI pipeline — because sometimes the interesting problems aren’t just engineering, they’re at the edge of what’s been done before.
My stack is deep: Java/Spring WebFlux, Ruby on Rails, Kafka, Kubernetes, Python, Go — whatever the problem calls for. I’ve worked across backend systems, full-stack products, and infrastructure, so I can move between layers without losing the thread.
I care about systems that are actually maintainable, teams that ship without burning out, and solutions that survive contact with production.

## Work Experience
### Staff Engineer @ Illumio
Jan 2026 – Present | Sunnyvale, California, United States
- Architecting a cloud-native observability platform with event-driven issue identification across multi-cloud environments; designing a 6-microservice pipeline using Kafka, KStreams, Cosmos DB, Neo4j, and Redis optimized for horizontal scale
- Driving technical strategy for policy compute infrastructure serving 4,000+ enterprise customers; defining architecture for next-generation distributed scheduling and caching systems

### Senior Software Engineer @ Illumio
Jan 2025 – Jan 2026 | Sunnyvale, California, United States
- Architected an event-driven policy precompute pipeline with a custom bucket-based fairness algorithm; led 8 engineers to ship 4 new microservices in 4 months, reducing policy computation latency by ~80%
- Re-engineered caching from per-process in-memory stores to a centralized Redis cluster with pipelining, multi-exec, consistent-hash sharding, and read replicas — consolidating ~20x redundant caches into a single shared layer
- Led evaluation and migration from Redis to DragonflyDB, achieving ~4x throughput improvement while enabling horizontal scaling without application-layer changes
- Designed and filed patent for a Natural Language → KQL AI pipeline with custom validators, model chaining, and self-improving feedback loops

### Member of Technical Staff II @ Illumio
Jan 2024 – Jan 2025 | Sunnyvale, California, United States
- Built reactive Java services (Spring Boot/WebFlux) for policy evaluation and workload sync across Kubernetes clusters, processing 500K+ daily policy computation events
- Optimized core policy compute engine (Rails, PostgreSQL, Redis, Kafka), reducing average query latency by 35% through index tuning and connection pool optimization
- Diagnosed and resolved production Kafka consumer lag and Memcached connection pooling issues behind HAProxy, cutting P99 response times and eliminating recurring outages
- Implemented Sidekiq-based job processing for multi-tenant workload management; led schema migrations improving performance on 100M+ row datasets

### Software Engineer @ University of Florida
Jan 2024 – Jan 2024 | Gainesville, Florida, United States
- Developed a full-stack React and Django-based educational platform, directly impacting 100+ students with potential for national expansion, part of a $1 million NSF project to integrate NLP/Al into middle school curriculum
- Innovated with Flutter applications to enable real-time health metric sharing in sports activities, achieving a 22% reduction in battery consumption for smartwatches with BLE, complemented by a robust analytics dashboard designed with React

### Research Assistant @ University of Florida
Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | Gainesville, Florida, United States
- Enhanced platform efficiency within Docker and ALB, contributing to a 30% less computation on virtual cores
- Implemented automated testing and test-driven development practices for storing user's health metrics and workout information using MongoDB and SQL server database within a Django-based web application

### Software Engineer @ Scaler Academy
Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India
- Led the creation of a Monaco editor-powered code editor using React-Redux (ES6), and TypeScript, resulting in a substantial increase in code submissions to 7 million annually, elevating global coding standards
- Engineered a patent-filed JavaScript-based TimingObject HLS video streaming solution with bandwidth optimization and syncing of videos across connected peers, which boosted user engagement by 50% and reduced instructor load by 2x
- Significantly enhanced platform performance and reliability by optimizing JavaScript and Webpack configurations, reducing dashboard load times from 4.17s to 2.24s, and developing robust APIs and comprehensive tests in Ruby on Rails with SQL integration, adhering to MVC patterns for improved user experience, accessibility, and scalability
- Implemented frontend test suites for React components and stateless functions using Cypress, Mocha, and Jest to ensure unit testing and integration testing with proper documentation

### Full Stack Instructor @ Scaler Academy
Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
- Taught Full stack engineering concepts to professional engineers in React and AWS
- Average rating of 4.92/5
- Taught 100+ engineers that directly impacted their work at respective companies

### React Native Developer @ Remedico
Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | India
- Implemented 20-25 reusable React components, reducing redundant codebase size by 8% and enhancing the app's efficiency
- Modernized Doctor's onboarding portal in React Native comprised of 3 screens with AntDesign design language

### React Native Developer @ DailyKIT
Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | New Delhi Area, India
- Built client side web pages on React and integrating them with GraphQL and Hasura REST API framework
- Writing frontend test cases in Jest for reusable react components
- Deployed storefronts for meal-kit delivery services across 3 companies in USA

### Teaching Professional @ Camp K-12
Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Gurgaon, Haryana, India
Taught Python to 30+ budding computer science enthusiasts

### React Developer @ Uniqgrid
Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Gurgaon, India
Built web portal for Uniqgrid’s IoT solutions using ReactJS-Redux
• Visualisation of data using ChartsJS and MomentJS
• Working with REST APIs from backend and JWT authentication
• Registered a steep growth in customer engagement through the portal by 60%


## Education
### Master's degree in Computer Science
University of Florida
Jan 2022 – Jan 2024

### Bachelor of Technology - BTech in Computer Science
Jaypee Institute Of Information Technology
Jan 2017 – Jan 2021


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/sunnydhama
- Website: https://sunny-dhama.com

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Source: https://flows.cv/sunnydhama
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/sunnydhama/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-29