Ajay Akilan
Site reliability engineer at Zoom, in Bangalore. I look after the infrastructure behind chat. It runs in fifteen regions across three clouds, and I’ve been on it since 2021.
How I got the job
Zoom had grown enormously through the pandemic and was building an India team from close to nothing. They came to my college in early 2021 to fill it. I hadn’t been to the pre-placement talk, so I went into the interviews knowing very little about the company and nothing at all about DevOps.
Somewhere in the technical rounds they asked what I’d do if the application went down. I said: tell people straight away, be honest about how long it’ll take, be clear about what I don’t know yet, and get the people who do know onto a call. When I didn’t know something I said so — at one point I told an interviewer that guessing would waste both our time.
A training course in my first week told me those were the principles of the job. I hadn’t worked them out. I’d just been the person waiting on an answer enough times to know what it costs when nobody says anything.
Then I was on production, on a system growing fast, and I learned the rest of it there.
What I actually do
Zoom’s chat runs on a set of services I look after — the APIs behind it, the real-time messaging layer, and the public edge it all arrives through. Fifteen regions, three clouds, and my name on it when it moves.
Five years on one system turns out to be worth something. You learn where it gives and where it doesn’t, which changes are quiet and which ones will find you out. Most of the job is knowing which is which before you press anything.
What I’ve done to it
Moved it onto Kubernetes. Replaced its public edge while it was still serving traffic. Put it in two regions at once, so losing one stopped being an event. Cut a seven-hour release to fifty-two minutes. Built the view of what’s actually happening. Took between 29 and 77 percent off what it costs to run.
→ Each one, drawn outThe other room
I write, direct, act, and draw. I plan the trips — for my team, for my family, for friends who’ve long since stopped pretending they’ll organise anything themselves. People ask me things because it’s easy to ask me things.
None of it is separate from the job. Production is production: you make the best thing you can, you learn whatever you’re missing to close the gap, you put it in front of people, and you stay in the room while it runs.
Does this actually fit?
Paste the job description. I’ll send you an honest read — where I fit, where I don’t, and what a keyword screen would miss.
It says no when the answer is no.
The job description and your email are used to send you the report and nothing else.
If you’d rather have it plain and scannable, it’s a page and a PDF.