# Varun Naik

> Software Engineer at Google

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

My interests lie at the intersection of databases and distributed systems. During my studies at UC Berkeley and UW-Madison, I learned about the good ideas identified in both of these fields over the decades. I brought this knowledge to Zendesk's Custom Objects, serving as one of the longest-tenured engineers on the project. In particular, I contributed heavily to the two access control mechanisms within the system. Now, I am starting a new role within Google's Cloud Spanner team.

In a nutshell, I like building strongly consistent database systems that expose powerful functionality for access control.

## Work Experience
### Software Engineer @ Google
Jan 2021 – Present
Contributing to Cloud Spanner.

### Software Engineer @ Zendesk
Jan 2018 – Jan 2021
• Implemented role-based access control (RBAC) to provide authorization for Custom Objects, Zendesk's object datastore
• Led the effort over two quarters to design and implement relationship-based access control (ReBAC) for Custom Objects
• Participated in 20+ onsite interviews and 40+ phonescreens, mostly for senior and staff engineers
• Guided engineers on my team through exercises to improve monitoring and reliability

### Teaching Assistant @ University of Wisconsin-Madison
Jan 2016 – Jan 2018
• Created and graded assignments for multiple undergraduate courses, notably CS 368 (C++ for Java Programmers)
• Held frequent office hours to provide one-on-one guidance for students

### Software Engineering Intern @ Zendesk
Jan 2017 – Jan 2017
• Developed an internal service to import OAS specfiles from GitHub into stoplight.io, a tool to design APIs
• Documented the common structure of my team's projects to aid future engineers in deployment

### Software Engineering Intern @ Asana
Jan 2016 – Jan 2016
• Configured on-premise Sentry to report exceptions from production Python code
• Contributed to an internal framework that wraps around Kubernetes, with plans to open-source the framework

### Undergraduate Student Instructor @ UC Berkeley
Jan 2015 – Jan 2016
• Led weekly discussion sections for CS 186 (Introduction to Database Systems) in Spring 2015 and Spring 2016
• Developed multiple-choice questions for online quizzes and free-response problems for exams

### Software Engineering Intern @ LinkedIn
Jan 2015 – Jan 2015
• Emitted information to a Kafka message queue about every request to internal LinkedIn apps
• Deployed a process to consume information from Kafka and periodically write to a database table
• Measured the per-request performance impact to convince senior engineers to approve my code changes

### Infrastructure Intern @ Redfin
Jan 2014 – Jan 2014
• Built Java (Spring) backend and JavaScript (Dojo) UI to store and modify server configuration settings
• Optimized existing code by introducing Google Gson to convert Java objects to JSON


## Education
### Master of Science - MS in Computer Science
University of Wisconsin-Madison

### Bachelor of Science - BS in EECS
University of California, Berkeley

### Archbishop Mitty High School


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/varuncnaik
- GitHub: https://github.com/varuncnaik
- Portfolio: http://pages.cs.wisc.edu/~vnaik/

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