Varun Kumar
Bengaluru
Summary
Principal Engineer with 15+ years of experience designing and leading cloud-native, Kubernetes-based distributed data platforms. Currently leading core platform initiatives at Smarsh, building systems that ingest, archive, index, search, and surveil petabytes of regulated communication data. Deep expertise in high-throughput data ingestion, durable archival, real-time indexing, low-latency search, and policy-driven surveillance over petabytes of regulated communication data to support compliance, supervision, and e-discovery workflows. Proven track record of architectural ownership, platform scalability, compliance-grade system design, and technical leadership.
Overview
16
16
years of professional experience
2
2
Certifications
Work History
Principal Engineer I
Smarsh India Pvt. Ltd.
04.2022 - Current
- Leading architecture and development of a multi-cloud, Kubernetes-native distributed data platform supporting ingestion, archival, indexing, search, and surveillance of petabytes of communication data.
- Designed high-throughput Kafka-based ingestion pipelines processing millions of events per day.
- Owned Elasticsearch-based indexing and search architecture enabling low-latency, compliance-grade queries.
- Built policy-driven surveillance workflows enabling supervision and investigation use cases.
- Mentored senior engineers and drove architecture reviews and platform best practices.
Lead Engineer
Smarsh India Pvt. Ltd.
10.2019 - 04.2022
- Led teams building cloud-native microservices to ingest data from collaboration platforms.
- Implemented Kafka-based ingestion feeding indexing, search, and surveillance systems.
- Led Kubernetes-based deployment and operations improving reliability and delivery velocity.
Member Technical / Systems Analyst
Actiance, Inc.
03.2015 - 10.2019
- Designed and implemented compliance, auditing, and surveillance platforms aligned with FINRA and HIPAA.
- Built backend services supporting policy enforcement, supervision, auditing, and regulatory reporting.
- Contributed to search and retrieval workflows for compliance investigations.
Senior Software Engineer
IndianStage.in
05.2010 - 03.2015
- Built backend services for a large-scale event management and ticketing platform.
- Decomposed a big monolithic application to microservices using industry standard integration patterns.
- Designed and deployed applications on AWS EC2 instances handling production traffic.
Education
Bachelor of Engineering - Computer Science
Anna University
Chennai01.2010
Skills
- Distributed Systems & Data Platforms
- Indexing
- Search & Surveillance Platforms
- Kubernetes & Container Orchestration
- Microservices Architecture
- Apache Kafka & Event Streaming
- Elasticsearch
- MongoDB
- PostgreSQL
- Hazelcast
- Redis
- AWS
- Pivotal Cloud Foundry
- High-Throughput Data Pipelines
- Observability
- Distributed Tracing & Reliability Engineering
- Technical Leadership & Agile Practices
Platform Reliability And Observability
- Designed and implemented end-to-end observability for large-scale, Kubernetes-based distributed systems using Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, and Jaeger across ingestion, indexing, search, and surveillance pipelines.
- Established golden signals (latency, traffic, errors, saturation) across critical data paths.
- Implemented distributed tracing with Jaeger, reducing MTTR by ~40-50% for complex multi-hop workflows.
- Built actionable dashboards and alerting strategies, reducing customer-impacting incidents by ~30%.
- Partnered with SRE teams to drive reliability engineering practices and production readiness.
Technology Stack
Java, Java 8+, Spring Boot, J2EE, Microservices, Apache Kafka, Apache Zookeeper, Elasticsearch, MongoDB, PostgreSQL, Hazelcast, Redis, Kubernetes, AWS (S3, EC2, RDS), Pivotal Cloud Foundry, Docker, Kubernetes, Maven, Concourse, Jenkins, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Jaeger
Certification
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner (CCP)
Accomplishments
Lead by Example Award - 2021
Timeline
Principal Engineer I
Smarsh India Pvt. Ltd.
04.2022 - Current
Lead Engineer
Smarsh India Pvt. Ltd.
10.2019 - 04.2022
Member Technical / Systems Analyst
Actiance, Inc.
03.2015 - 10.2019
Senior Software Engineer
IndianStage.in
05.2010 - 03.2015
Bachelor of Engineering - Computer Science
Anna University