Warren Veerasingam

Feb 2025 - Jul 2026

Technical Co-founder (backed by a16z)

• Co-founded a startup backed by a16z Speedrun, leading product strategy and end-to-end engineering from concept to MVP.
• Developed an AI-native storytelling platform using Go, Python, React/Next.js, PostgreSQL, graph databases, and vector databases, rapidly shipping features based on continuous customer feedback.
• Built the internal developer platform that allowed engineers to rapidly experiment, iterate, and ship new features.
• Led product demos to investors and customers, conducted user interviews, validated pricing and customer willingness to pay.

Sept 2022 - Feb 2025

Senior Software Engineer

• Designed and implemented an AI-powered search engine for shot and model retrieval for animators. Previously, shots and models were manually tagged and inserted into the database. This pipeline implementation eliminated manual work and improved the search results.
  • This reduced search time for animators and modelers, increasing efficiency and productivity.
• Revamped Pixar's development workflow with CICD practices, transitioning from manual to automated build and deployment. Additionally, refined management of secrets and configuration files.
• Pioneered the development of a comprehensive testing suite for Presto, the animation software utilized by animators, ensuring code integrity and reliability. Enabled the use of the render farm for building and testing the software.
  • The transition from CPU to GPU led to frequent and regular builds, which shortened release cycle.

Jul 2018 - Jul 2022

Senior Site Reliability Engineer - Team Lead

• Designed a fully fault-tolerant serverless distributed system using AWS Lambdas and Step functions – diminishing the need for physical servers
  • This improved the reliability of the application as failed tasks can be queued for retries - preventing a single point of failure
• Implemented message queues to decouple existing distributed system
  • As a result, the application does not need to depend on the number of concurrent connections to the database or be weighed down by the communication within the code
• Developed tools to automatically shutdown non-production environments and restart them up before work day
  • Resulting in a 40% cost reduction in monthly bill
• Pioneered new monitoring tools to collect container and application level metrics
  • Was able to isolate bottlenecks and improve the overall performance of the system
• Redesigned the deployment pipeline to include security and vulnerability testing
• Enhanced the implementation of DB-maintain by utilizing Flyway to maintain and update the databases; by automating the process
  • This eliminated the need for a full time DBA
• Mentored 4 new team members and taught them Site Reliability Engineering practices in three weeks
  • Enabling them to add value to the company within a month

Aug 2014 - Jul 2018

DevOps Engineer

• Adapted AWS ‘s Well Architected Framework while building the infrastructure
  • Introduced and pioneered the usage of microservices at Pearson
• Architected the initial infrastructure with Docker containers on isolated VPC with ALB, CloudWatch events and logs, Auto Scaling groups, Relational Database Services, serverless Lambdas applications, CloudFront, Route53, and IAM
  • This set the foundation for other products within Pearson
• Collaborated with the release engineering team to isolate the infrastructure deployment from code deployment by setting up 2 discrete pipelines
  • Reduced release cycle from monthly to biweekly

Jan 2013 - Aug 2014

Software Developer

• Migrated products and services from the legacy in-house servers to AWS - cutting maintenance costs by 30%
• Implemented auto-scaling to scale up servers when services are being used extensively, and scale down when usage is low
  • Improved the server capacity to handle 1.5 million simultaneous test takers and lowering the cost of hosting
• Collaborated with the release engineering team to isolate the infrastructure deployment from code deployment by setting up 2 discrete pipelines
  • Reduced release cycle from monthly to biweekly. Reduced duration of deployment time.
• Pioneered the usage of Chef as a tool to provision servers across all products in the company
• Refactored and improved existing Nagios scripts which monitor the state of daemons for the backend engine
  • Reducing the downtime of the backend system
• Developed a fully automated end-to-end smoke test pipeline by integrating Jenkins and Selenium
• Influenced the manager to switch from the dynamically-typed language, Perl to the statically-typed language, Go by developing prototypes and comparing cases in both languages

Dec 2012

Computer Science, Actuarial Science and Information Systems

• Presidential Scholarship for Academic Excellence recipient, total award in the top 10th percentile

• 4 patents, US 9,507,972 B2, US 9,311,048 B1 US 10,078,670 B2, US 10,977,259 B2
  • Developed software that enables teachers to easily administer classroom-level quizzes by using their mobile phones.
  • This technology is currently being used by Pearson

• github.com/warrensbox
  • Developed a collection of open source development tools that provide software developers and cloud architects the additional means to develop, test, and deploy their applications
  • One notable project - tfswitch - 1500 stars and used by large companies such as SalesForce and ForcePoint. With 15 million downloads

• Technical Skills
  Languages

  • Go
  • Python
  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • Bash

  Frameworks

  • FastAPI
  • Flask
  • Next.js
  • React

  Cloud & Infrastructure

  • AWS
  • GCP
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • Terraform
  • Rancher

  Databases

  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • MongoDB
  • Neo4j (Graph)
  • Weaviate
  • Milvus
  • pgvector (Vector)

  Observability

  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • Splunk
  • CloudWatch
  • Datadog
  • PagerDuty
• Certification
  • AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
• Articles - Writer at warrensbox.com
• Interest - flying airplanes, sailing, scuba diving, photography, soccer and water polo