About

Balaji V is an experienced engineering leader with a strong track record of building distributed systems, establishing and improving service level agreements, releasing products on schedule, and building and scaling remote and local teams. With almost 20 years of relevant experience, Balaji is an expert in managing data infrastructures and data engineering platforms. Currently, Balaji is working at Pandion, where he is building data infrastructure and machine learning operations teams. He is responsible for hiring software and data infrastructure engineers and ensuring the smooth functioning of the teams. Balaji is also a software engineer at Pandion, where he develops data infrastructures. Prior to joining Pandion, Balaji was the Head of Graph Database and Cloud at Dgraph Labs. He headed engineering and reported to the founder, collaborating with him to set up, expand, and manage all the engineering teams that developed the open-source distributed Graph database Dgraph and its cloud offering. Balaji built product roadmaps, engaged with customers and communities, established service level agreements, and delivered on-time product releases. He also represented engineering in sales and customer support discussions and collaborated with marketing to build go-to-market strategies. Before Dgraph Labs, Balaji worked at Cruise Automation, where he built and managed multiple teams responsible for handling and serving all the autonomous vehicle data generated at Cruise. He streamlined the solution to have ETL pipelines that process petabytes of data, enabling consumption of this data by engineering and non-engineering teams such as data science, machine learning, finance, and legal. Balaji built a data mart that consumes petabytes of data, lead the creation of an application that ingests millions of data points for time series analysis, and designed and delivered a pipeline that processes millions of files per day and warehouses them in BigQuery for data analysis. Balaji has expertise in infrastructures, machine learning, data engineering, software engineering, Golang, data science, and ETL. He is an excellent communicator and collaborator and has a demonstrated ability to build and lead high-performing teams.