Surya Vakkalanka

Founding VP of Engineering | AI Products and Innovation
2016
Currently leading teams to drive innovation using AI and to deliver delightful AI products and experiences for enterprise customers. - Built and scaled Eightfold products, services and platform from the ground up - Helped scale the organization and business from Series-A stage to post Series-E stage - Drove innovation and new product development by leading company-wide Hackathons and fostering a culture of continuous innovation - Instrumental in board meetings to help define product and GTM strategy

2023 - 2025

Founding Member and GM
2023 - 2025
With blindfold.ai, you can easily create a pseudo-identity and custom-tailored resumes for any job. Led all aspects of blindfold.ai - ideation, design, prototyping, developing, launching, growth-hacking and GTM.

2014 - 2016

Director of Engineering | Mobile, Smart Hub, TV
2014 - 2016
Engineering Strategy and Execution, Engineering Management, Hands-on Coding - Led Platform Engineering for Samsung Plus (personalized customer experience and loyalty app with over ~8M MAU and growing) and Core Platform Services for Samsung eCommerce app - Led a geo-distributed team, co-located across Mountain View, Dallas, Sao Paulo, Seattle and New Jersey - Architected and developed data-driven microservice APIs using Node.js, Kubernetes, Docker, Cassandra, ElasticSearch, SQS, and an array of AWS solutions - Built a dynamic user profile and personalized content recommendation platform that powered self-service customer support tools and e-commerce applications for Samsung.com and Samsung Mobile apps - Built 10 foot TV experiences using Node.js, MongoDB, React.js, Angular.js, and AWS for Samsung Smart TVs - Led a team that built and maintained the cloud infrastructure and APIs for Samsung's 19" Galaxy View tablet

2013 - 2014

Entrepreneur in Residence
2013 - 2014
- Led the development and acquisition (by Samsung Mobile) of the first start-up (Terrain) backed by Samsung Next - Terrain is an Android launcher that helps organize and streamline the default Android experience by making everything you care about quick and easy to access http://terrainhome.com http://samsungaccelerator.com http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=k-msK5k_2Ko

2012 - 2013

Principal Architect, WebOS | Acquired by LG
2012 - 2013
- Led the design, architecture and implementation of a cross-platform, open source JavaScript Framework called EnyoJS. - Started by HP webOS, Enyo was eventually acquired by LG Silicon Valley Labs http://enyojs.com

2011 - 2012

Principal Architect
2011 - 2012
- Worked closely with the Founder and CPO of ServiceNow to rearchitect their UI to scale - Instrumental in building the San Jose Engineering team from the ground up

2010 - 2012

Founder @ Multiple Startups
2010 - 2012
pixawe.com - Built a drag-and-drop WYSIWYG editor for rapidly building mobile optimized web applications. hutke.com - Built a social mood-based music streaming app for iOS and Android and grew the user base to over 300,000 DAU. iPhone app was featured in the Top 100 world-wide music apps in the Apple App Store. During this fantastic journey, I negotiated content partnership deals and led content acquisition strategies besides driving innovative monetization efforts to generate a recurring revenue stream from ads and memberships.

2010 - 2011

Mobile Architect
2010 - 2011
Architected and developed a suite of mobile apps used by internal retail (Apple Store) employees besides mobilizing a suite of internal BI (Business Intelligence) desktop applications for the iPad and iPhone. Designed and implemented a geo-spatial (heat-mapping) solution using Google/Yahoo! Maps APIs for visualizing key CORDA business intelligence reports while leading a team of offshore software engineers based out of India.

2006 - 2010

Sr. Product Manager (Yahoo! Video)
2008 - 2010
- Led a product line representing over $12 million in annual revenue. - Enabled Yahoo! properties including News, Sports, Finance and Movies to serve video ads and generate additional revenues by replacing legacy video players with video-ad-supported players. - Reduced the time-to-market by 60% for custom video player deployments by launching a self-service tool for customizing and managing video player instances across Yahoo!. - Led market research on video traffic patterns, user demographics and video viewership statistics. - Evangelized platform capabilities by building demo apps and hosting technology summits and internal hack-day events and developed award-winning ideas on various internal hack-day events.
Sr. Lead Software Engineer (Yahoo! Search)
2006 - 2008
- Developed scalable RESTful web-services for serving Yahoo! Video metadata and architected a self-service tool for content publishers to manage their daily video workflow needs. - Developed a proprietary CMS tool for editorially managing videos featured by video.yahoo.com. - Led a Front-End Engineering team for globalizing video.yahoo.com into 14 countries and languages.

2000 - 2006

Director Software Engineering
2000 - 2006
ZL (ZipLip) develops software for mid-large enterprises (primarily financial and health-care industries) for turn-key e-mail solutions such as email security, archival, discovery and SEC compliance. During the 6 years at ZipLip, I wore several hats in the company. I started with hands-on development and quickly grew to the Director of Engineering role. Over my tenure, I enabled ZL as the solution of choice for major partners, resellers in the US, Japan and Korea. Also architected and Product-Managed multiple versions (web and mobile) of ZL’s application suite, developed content-analysis tools for classifying, storing, indexing and retrieving millions of email messages efficiently.

Product & Engineering Leader | Entrepreneur | Founding Team @ Breakthrough AI Startups | Ex-Apple, Samsung, Yahoo