About

Janani Narayanan is a Senior Staff Engineer at Uber with over 14 years of relevant experience in solving problems at scale. She started her career as a security consultant at one of the big four auditors, performing penetration testing and network security audits for clients in telecom, banking, and government sectors. Later, she pivoted to distributed systems and worked in AWS DynamoDB soon after the product launched. As a key member of SimpleDB and control plane of DynamoDB, she designed and led features that had a huge impact on performance and scalability. Janani has led interesting and challenging efforts across multiple teams at Uber, including the Trips team, which is the backbone for all processing of Uber events such as trips, eats, and freight. She also led the Rider Promotions team, which handles all trip promotions in real-time, and the Rider Fares team, which curates the fare for every single Uber rider and eats order. In addition, she worked on the Intelligence team to identify anomalies in trip fare in real-time with a streaming pipeline processing a few thousand events per second. She also worked as an Applied ML and platform engineer in the Pricing team to figure out the optimal price for a trip while balancing business metrics. Janani's past experience includes working as a Software Engineer II (DynamoDB control plane) and Software Engineer (SimpleDB & DynamoDB) at Amazon. At Amazon, she designed architecture changes to scale the control plane from 10 concurrent operations to hundred thousand operations. She also designed and built the control plane workflow for online global secondary index creation and implemented task versioning for the control plane, which enabled upgrade/downgrade of workflows. In addition, she automated the auto-repair process, reducing the load on operations from ~100 on-call tickets to under 5 in a month. Janani holds a Master's degree in Computer Science from the Georgia Institute of Technology and a Bachelor's degree in Information Technology from the College of Engineering, Guindy. She also completed an executive education program from Harvard Business School. Her tech stack includes AWS, software engineering, testing, and ML. Overall, Janani is a highly skilled engineer with a proven track record of solving complex problems at scale.