About

Balaji Venkatesan is a Lead Software System Engineer at Freshworks with 7.95 years of relevant experience in designing and developing distributed systems with a focus on performance and scalability. He has strong work ethics and is responsible for complete ownership of core application features from whiteboard to production level code. Balaji has 5+ years of experience in working with startup and product-based companies, designing prime features that were technically challenging and used by multiple paying customers. As a Senior Platforms Engineer at Freshworks, he led a team of four members and designed and developed the customization of password policy from scratch, which is being consumed by multiple revenue-generating products. He also designed and implemented an OIDC protocol-based microservice for authentication that has served over 600M unique requests with a success rate of 99.6%. Balaji is experienced in building microservice-based applications using Spring boot, Redis, MySQL, gRPC, and REST. He reduced the operation cost of core services by reducing the CPU usage by 75%, thereby preventing unnecessary auto-scaling. He also designed and implemented a config-driven third-party single sign-on support, which helped in gaining new customers and increased the adoption rate of the authentication platform service. With focus on the code quality, he was involved in improving the code coverage across the entire application and reduced the Redis cache space by 80% through implementation of a new serialization mechanism using protobuf. Balaji's education background includes an Engineer’s degree in Computer Science from Panimalar Engineering College. His tech stack includes Redis, Microservices, Software Engineer, MySQL, Spring, Java, Kubernetes, Docker, and Spring Boot.