Yashas Shankar

As the Head of Engineering for the Cloud Transition Capabilities charter at Atlassian, my primary responsibility is to ensure customer success during their migration and journey in Atlassian cloud. Onboarding customers to the Atlassian cloud is a top priority for the company, serving as a significant driver of revenue.

Key Responsibilities :

• Leading five engineering teams, including the Portfolio Manager, Backup and Restore, Change Management, Cloud Data Portability (Sandbox), and Competitive Displacement.
• The team consists of 78 engineers, 6 Senior Engineering Managers, and 4 Senior Architects, distributed across India and Europe.
• Collaborating with Product and Design leaders from Australia, the EU, and India.
• Played a pivotal role in defining the strategy for the owned charters. Transformed the roadmap and platforms to enable large enterprise customers, resulting in a significant enhancement in platform capabilities. This effort facilitated the onboarding of 80% of paid users to the cloud solution.
• Developed the portfolio management and competitive displacement charters through customer immersion sessions and by fostering consensus among product and engineering leaders across Atlassian.
• Enhanced platform reliability by 15% and improved performance by over 70%, significantly elevating the customer experience.
• Increased team productivity by 20% through the establishment of effective planning, execution, operational, and quality frameworks, enabling the absorption of an additional charter of 10 engineers without increasing headcount.
• Achieved 1400% cost savings, amounting to $x millions, by identifying and promoting innovation across cross-organizational teams.
• Designed frameworks to reduce Customer Support Costs related to the owned charters by 30%.
• Successfully hired 2 Managers, 4 Architects, and 10 Tech Leads within two months of team formation. Currently serving as an integral part of the hiring committee for Atlassian.
• Actively mentoring two engineering leaders outside of the current parent organization.
• Leading branding initiatives for Atlassian India through Atlassian hosted Leadership Roundtables and Engineering Community Technology Talks.

Dunzo is a hyperlocal grocery quick commerce and logistics company whose goal was to drive convenience to customers by delivering any grocery needs in 20 minutes. They are also the leading last-mile delivery partner for many enterprise and medium-sized consumer businesses.

Key Responsibilities :

• Led the entire engineering/product/TPM organization comprising of the storefront, supply chain, cataloguing, logistics, customer support, and platform charters.
• The team comprised 110 engineers of which there are 6 Senior Engineering managers, 6 Product Managers, 3 Senior Architects, and 4 Technical Program Managers
• Was key to defining and operationalizing the right organizational structure to facilitate optimum velocity, growth and collaboration.
• Was instrumental in identifying and solving key operational deficiencies in warehouse management and delivery partner utilization by continuously doing site visits and delivery runs. This contributed to reducing operational costs by 50%
• Conceptualized and built an efficient delivery partner allocation and batching engine in record time which saved delivery costs by 50% amounting to $30 million per year.
• Built an in-house warehouse management system that has inventory management, intelligent product in-warding, audit and alignment mechanisms to reduce wastage by 20% and store cost by 30%. Eliminated an inefficient third-party platform dependency which led to cost savings of 50% on platform and operational costs.
• Was instrumental in incorporating intelligence in procurement and delivery supply planning pipelines. These measures optimized per-order burn by 60%.
• Conceptualized the leadership and engineer/TPM competency and evaluation framework, which was instrumental in enabling high-standard performance evaluation and growth frameworks.
• Drove high standards of operational excellence by defining the right engineering strategy, planning-execution-review processes, and making continuous improvements to increase agility and predictability. These practices have led to a reduction in engineering cycle time by 40%, faster releases, higher uptime, reduced operating costs, improved quality and customer satisfaction.
• Facilitated and governed high standards of user experience and insights on the supply chain, delivery operations and post-order experience apps, which reduced customer service contact rates by 50%.
• Was instrumental in streamlining the post-release GTM framework to facilitate quick learning and expedited scale-up of the feature. This improved GTM completion timelines by 50%
• Conceptualized the hiring evaluation and process framework for engineering. This helped in hiring high-quality engineers and managers. Increased engineering team size by 100, hired the entire TPM org of size 6, and 4 Engineering Directors.

Tech Stack: GoLang, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, ES, Redis, Bigtable, NewRelic, GCP Services

• Responsible for driving Pricing, Promotions, Catalog Management, Vendor Management, Procurement and Seller Experience engineering charters. These charters had the highest revenue and margin impact in the organization.
• Drove the conceptualization of the platform and product vision for the above said charters. Collaborated with 2 Product Directors and 6 product managers to make the charter a success.
• Responsible for the growth and deliverables of 72 talented engineers and 6 Senior Engineering Managers driving these charters. Had retention of less than 10% annually.
• Built platforms from scratch, and re-architected legacy platforms to conform to high standards of Reliability, Scale and Performance.
• Led the team to deliver on initiatives that had a revenue impact of $55 Million, improved product sell-through rates by 50%, biz-ops efficiency by 40%, seller experience NPS by 40%.
• Saved $432K on infrastructure costs by re-architecting and optimizing resource usage.
• Improved engineer productivity by 30% by innovating and operationalizing a TTD-based SDLC framework and utilizing L2 support efficiently. Implemented first in my team and was adopted across the organization.
• Drove the leadership learning forum across engineering to aid the creation and transformation of managers into inspirational leaders.
• Ideated a change management process which was adopted across the organization which has contributed to better engineer focus and ensured delivery hit rates of 95%.
• Focus on the right initiatives led to the reduction of commit to deploy latencies by 75%, reduction of MTTR latencies by 50%, improvement of platform scalability by 60%, improvement of platform reliability by 40%, platform availability to 99.99%, and scale to serve upto 80K QPS.
• Built communication frameworks to ensure clarity and transparency between business, product and engineering.
• Built high-performing teams from scratch. Inspired and transformed low-performing/de-motivated teams due to leadership deficiencies into high-velocity performant teams.
• Ideated and operationalized a transparent and efficient performance management process and competencies which was adopted by the entire engineering vertical. This resulted in annual attrition reducing to less than 10% and manager effectiveness scores improving from 60 to 85%.
• Responsible for compensation and reward management for 72 engineers. Efficient reward management has contributed to less than 10% annual attrition. Efficient third-party vendor management has led to cost savings of Rs 25 million.
• Drove the hiring strategy and resource allocation for 6 teams.

Tech Stack: Java, Spring Boot, MySQL, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Kafka, Redis, Ehcache

• Led a team of 25 engineers to build the next-generation competitive intelligence and smart Pricing and Promotions SaaS platform for global fashion group of companies. and order and rewards management platforms for Jabong.
• Delivered on initiatives which led to revenue gains of $25 million
• As a Global Fashion Group pricing platform delivery manager, successfully delivered the pricing platform across 4 companies (ICONIC Australia, ZALORA Singapore, LAMODA Russia, JABONG India). Was reporting directly to the CTO of Global Fashion Group companies.
• Re-architected the pricing platform to make it SaaS-ready and auto-scale capable which led to significant savings of 400% on infrastructure costs.
• Introduced and motivated the team to ensure adherence to design, coding and quality best practices. This led to major improvements in performance, scalability, resiliency and robustness of the platform.
• Drove the multi-tenancy charter for Jabong to aid successful migration to the Myntra tech stack post-acquisition. Post-acquisition headed the engineering charter of the combined pricing and promotions team.
• Was responsible for setting the performance goals and metrics for the team.
• Designed and developed pricing algorithms and workflows to aid optimized and smart pricing decisions.
• Worked on improving the operational efficiency of the teams by 40%.
• Performed a product manager role for 1.5 years due to the unavailability of the product manager.
• Tech Stack : Java, Spring , MySQL, MongoDB, RabbitMQ, Redis, Solr.

Was responsible for building the next-generation NAS and SAN storage multi-tenant virtual storage solutions.

These storage platforms were running critical workloads for multiple big organizations.

As a technical lead collaborated with teams across geographies (India/US) to ensure seamless integration and architectural correctness.

Was instrumental in building the next-generation packet/optical edge routers. Was a key contributor in building the Element Management System. Lead engineer to interface with the teams in Israel (involved frequent travel)) to aid seamless integration between the application and the packet/optical boxes. Was driving the End-to-end integration team and was responsible for delivering the optimal solution to the end customer. This involved integrating the flow of events from CLI⬄EMS⬄NMS.

Worked as an instructor for the Intermediate and Advanced Computer Science Training’ course in the Young Scholars program (https://ysp.osta.fsu.edu/program-information) for 2 summers.

Instructor for a computer major course for 2 semesters. Was the only teaching assistant to teach a major course.