# Susheel Aroskar > Engineering Lead - Cloud Native Distributed Systems Location: Fremont, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/susheel Customer focused accomplished software engineering leader with proven track record in building many complex, large, distributed, highly available mission critical systems. I specialize in finding solutions to large, ambiguous problems where it's hard to figure out how to even start. In my current position, have delivered many key initiatives for Netflix to support its explosive growth over the last decade: • Part of original team that moved Netflix from its own data center to Cloud. • Helped build Open Connect, Netflix's own purpose-built CDN to handle its massive video and audio traffic. • Designed and Developed Zuul 2 - async version of Netflix's API gateway to efficiently handle ever increasing API traffic and client connections. Conceived and realized vision of a whole new server to client, low latency push based channel to unlock many innovative product solutions and integrations. • Designed key data abstraction services to securely handle petabytes of Netflix data across three AWS regions. Many of these projects were multi-quarter, large initiatives that required careful but flexible planning, clear communication to establish shared context across multiple teams, negotiating priorities and trade-offs while rallying support from senior stakeholders to individual contributors. ## Work Experience ### Principal Engineer @ Snowflake Jan 2022 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area ### Engineering Lead - Cloud Data Engineering @ Netflix Jan 2010 – Jan 2022 | San Francisco Bay Area • Led company-wide secure data gateway initiative to secure wide variety (MySQL, PostgreSQL, CockroachDB, Elasticsearch) of 500+ data stores using Netflix specific custom authentication and authorization at layer 4. Collaborated with InfoSec org and multiple application development teams across company to rollout secure data access program successfully. • Built high level distributed data abstractions like key-value, time series and global counters on top of Envoy, Cassandra, CockroachDB and Memcached for enabling higher platform leverage and developer velocity. Evangelized these abstractions within company, trained many developers in their use while providing ongoing support, cultivating long term relationships with users. These data abstractions are now widely adopted within Netflix as de-facto data solutions with 350+ clusters deployed. • Designed global data positioning system to scale replication of petabytes of Netflix data beyond its current 3 AWS regions. Helped create shared vision for the new global data platform across traffic, networking, data and application teams. ### Architect - Studio Finance @ Netflix Jan 2019 – Jan 2021 | San Francisco Bay Area • Architect for financial accounting system used by Netflix to report its 10-Q / 10-K numbers to SEC. • Drove early adoption of GraphQL and common federated data graph across whole Netflix Studio org by leading by example. • Hired and mentored new engineers. ### Engineering Lead - Cloud Gateway (Zuul) @ Netflix Jan 2016 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area • Lead design, development and roll out of Zuul - Netflix's open source async load balancer + API gateway that handles 4M+ RPS. • Sensed unaddressed need for low latency server to client push channel in Netflix's application networking stack. Championed a vision for server push based solution within company. Built push notification server that handles 100M+ concurrent, persistent WebSocket connections from Netflix devices in field. • Negotiated with device and security teams across company to incorporate Zuul push support in Netflix client SDKs which we were able to leverage later to build things like Netflix/Alexa integration. ### Senior Software Engineer - Open Connect @ Netflix Jan 2013 – Jan 2016 | San Francisco Bay Area • Collaborated with data warehouse org to build network congestion model to efficiently analyze congestion across all internet CIDR blocks using custom radix tree data structure implementation. • Optimized CDN steering algorithm for OpenConnect - Netflix's CDN that handles 1/3 of all North American internet traffic during peak hours. • Built distributed, fault tolerant job running service to run Open Connect's mission critical, time sensitive jobs reliably. ### Senior Software Engineer - Membership Engineering @ Netflix Jan 2010 – Jan 2013 | San Francisco Bay Area • Part of original team that moved Netflix from its own data center to AWS cloud. • Built subscriber identity service - Netflix's first tier 0 micro-service in cloud. Shared best practices learned with wider developer community within the company. • Developed custom replication from Oracle in data center to Cassandra in cloud to live migrate millions of customers' data without any service disruption. ### Open Source Project Founder @ Open Source Project: Luaw Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 Luaw is an open source, event driven, non blocking HTTP app server based on Lua, inspired by Node.js. It uses Lua coroutines in place of nested callbacks to simplify application code. https://github.com/raksoras/luaw ### Principal Software Engineer @ EBay Jan 2004 – Jan 2010 | San Francisco Bay Area • Led development of eBay classifieds global platform from its inception. Collaborated with product managers, designers and multiple senior level stakeholders to prioritize conflicting demands on the multinational, multilingual platform in terms of its feature roadmap and schedule. • Won CEO's innovation award for new business idea ## Education ### B.S. in Electrical Engineering – Instrumentation University of Mumbai ### Post Graduate Diploma in Software Technology National Center for Software Technology ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/susheel-aroskar --- Source: https://flows.cv/susheel JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/susheel/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-12