Dhananjay Balan

🏠 Berlin, Germany 📧 mail@dbalan.in

Senior Software Engineer with experience in Security, Infrastructure and Backend Engineering.

WORK HISTORY

Port Zero is a software consultancy with expertize in security and networking.

Team Lead: Helping the software team with technical decision making, managing the team.
API/SDN Layer: Helped design and develop a haskell API layer that exposes APIs for network infrastructure to manage authentication, routing and customer management.
Infrastructure and Security Lead: Helped a SaaS provider to set infrastructure strategies & security policies. Worked on with the team to implement them. The focus was on improving security of the platform and reducing development turn-around time.

Cliqz develops a browser with integrated search and tools to protect user privacy on web.

Data Platform: Rewrote system for downloading and processing billions of urls with a focus on simplifying operations and performance. The system processes around a TB of data daily.
New Products: Designed and implemented account backend system for a new software product sold as subscription. Had to incorporate password-less login, reducing user interaction as much as possible.
Security Improvements: Designed tools and strategy to improve overall security and compliance of the platform. This included pushing a platform wide TLS enforcement and enforcing strong TLS ciphers to ensure forward-secrecy.
Increasing Developer Productivity: Built a CI pipeline to build MacOS targets in Linux, reducing overhead of maintaining MacOS build nodes – link to PR.

Infrastructure Software Engineer at Plivo Inc: October 2013 – February 2016

Plivo is a SaaS company providing APIs to build VoIP systems.

Scaling For Traffic: Rewrote the core business logic for routing calls that are region specific through multiple data-centers with strict latency requirements.
Increasing Developer Productivity: Scaled the infrastructure from hand written scripts to an automatically launched, auto-scaling platform.

FreeBSD contributor – link to freebsd.org.
Small patches in the Linux kernel – link to git.kernel.org.
Worked with Center for Internet and Society, an NGO working in intersection of tech and society. Mapping out internals of budget smartphones to identify the corresponding patents – link to project write-up.
I run my own personal infrastructure (storage, backups, web servers etc) – link to blog write-up.

Backend: Haskell, Go, Python
Infrastructure/Platform: Configuration Management, AWS, Cloudformation, Ansible, Kubernetes, Cryptography, Security Policies
Data processing: Hadoop, Spark, Apache Kafka

Recurse center is a self-directed educational retreat for programmers in New York city.

Cryptography: Implemented basic cartographic systems like RSA, SRP, AES block modes and attacks against them – code at github.
Hardware: Worked on an 80’s era HP plotter, figuring out hardware interfaces and writing interfacing software – featured on hackaday.

Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering. GPA 7.9/10 (more is better)

Website	https://dbalan.in	Github	https://github.com/dbalan/
Blog	https://blog.dbalan.in/	LinkedIn	https://www.linkedin.com/in/dhananjay-balan-68a2b714
Résumé	https://resume.dbalan.in	PDF	https://resume.dbalan.in/resume.pdf