CPU: 95%
Memory: 87%
Throughput: 1.2M/s
Latency: 2.3ms
Senior Performance Engineer

Arunkumar Saravanan

Performance & Scalability Engineering

6 Years of Experience
Latest Blog: Building StarTree's Release Certification Service
Latest Article: 40% JSON Parsing Speedup in Apache Pinot
Latest Article: Uncovering 3 Performance Optimizations in Apache Pinot's Protobuf Ingestion
$1.8M
Cost Savings
70%
STW Reduction
15-20%
CPU Utilization Improvement
Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India
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System Performance

Online
Response Time (ms)
QPS 12.5K
P99 45ms
Error Rate 0.01%

About Me

Arunkumar Saravanan

As a Performance Engineer, I specialize in optimizing large-scale distributed systems, enhancing efficiency, and driving cost savings. My passion lies in scalability & cloud performance. Currently at StarTree, I've built a Release Certification Framework as a Service that streamlines performance and functional validation for StarTree Pinot and leading the Release Certification and other Performance Benchmarking Initiatives

Experience

Mar 2025 - Present

Senior Performance Engineer

StarTree

Remote - Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

Benchmarks/Certification & Regression Testing

  • Conducted certification tests for StarTree Releases and signing off for Production deployment. Also contributed to specific feature testings like OOM Protection testing
  • Built Deployment Prechecks to detect Customer’s Ingestion Transformation breakages due to backward compatibility issues in new Release.
  • Built tools to create customer replica queries & synthetic dataset by parsing broker logs and onboarded 15+ customer replica queries
  • Identified and suggested fix to improve Apace Pinot Reload Operation time by ~35% using Thread Level Caching
  • Identified 3 Performance bugs in Protobuf Pinot Ingestion Pipeline that has potential to save 15-20% CPU Utilization
  • Conducted Graviton benchmarking for StarTree Pinot
  • Minor Performance Contributions to Apache Pinot OSS
  • Ensured the continuous availability of production Pinot clusters by participating in on-call rotation

Certification Framework

  • Designed and built a comprehensive Testing Framework as a Service to certify StarTree releases, encompassing automated functional, performance, and operational validations. The platform includes a reusable automation framework, internal utilities SDK, and deployment-as-a-service model, with native support for realtime ingestion validation (via ShadowTraffic) and an AI-powered Comparison Assistant to detect regressions, improve release confidence, and strengthen customer trust in production deployments
Aug 2023 - Mar 2025

Member of Technical Staff

Salesforce

Bangalore, Karnataka, India

AI & LLM

  • Enhanced internal AI Agent with LLM-based intent recognition and chat history integration
  • Developed POC to solve broken selector problem using LLM for UI-based testing

EC2 Selection & Cloud Performance

  • Led Graviton 3rd & 4th Gen processor performance evaluation in Hyperforce CoreApp in collaboration with AWS team
  • Worked on performance assessments for different App and DB instance types (m6i.24xl, u-6tb1)
  • Led GP2 to GP3 migration evaluation in Hyperforce, resulting in ~$1.8M in cost savings
  • Worked on vertical scaling performance evaluation for m6a.32xl instance type

JVM/JDK Optimization

  • JVM tuning including THP, StringDedup, Escape analysis - contributed to 5-10% CPU utilization improvement
  • JVM heap size reduction effort to 48GB - contributed to ~3GB heap size improvement
  • Evaluated Zing JVM performance in collaboration with Azul team
  • Worked on performance evaluation for JDK11 to JDK17 migration
Jan 2022 - Jul 2023

Associate Member of Technical Staff

Salesforce

Hyderabad, Telangana, India

Database Performance

  • Assisted with performance load execution and DB analysis for migrating premium customer to Salesforce's in-house database
  • Worked on evaluating performance of key scaling feature of Salesforce's in-house database

Release Certification

  • Worked on Salesforce Release and Patch Certification on Hyperforce and First Party environments
  • Assisted in RHEL9 OS performance assessment in Hyperforce to debug and analyze performance profiles

Tooling & Automation

  • Created data transfer pipeline to Tableau Analytics using Python & Shell
  • Developed JMeter scripts for performance assessments and stabilized existing workloads
  • Developed utility tool to validate performance load generating payloads to boost productivity
Aug 2020 - Dec 2021

Performance and Scalability Engineer

Zoho Corporation

Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

Application Server Scalability

  • Improved Application Server's scalability through several JVM, JIT & Heap tunings
  • Reduced ParNew Garbage collection STW duration by around 70%
  • Worked on API scaling including code optimization and capacity planning

Monitoring & Performance

  • Set up monitoring team and tools for Premium Customers
May 2019 - Jul 2020

Site Reliability Engineer

Zoho Corporation

Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

Monitoring & Performance

  • Worked on monitoring staging setup of Zoho CRM to flag off build release to Production
  • Educated developers in improving performance

Debugging & Optimization

  • Experience in debugging and code optimization in staging and Production environment
  • Experience with profiling tools like VisualVM, Async Profiler
  • Worked with development teams to ensure product scalability before live releases
Feb 2019 - Mar 2019

Project Trainee

Zoho Corporation

Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India

Technical Skills

General

JVM JIT GC Generative AI

Cloud Computing

AWS

Performance Testing

JMeter

Programming Languages

Java Python Javascript

Databases

MySQL PostgreSQL

Operating Systems

Linux

Tools

Docker Kubernetes Grafana Prometheus Jenkins Shell

Education

2015 - 2019

B.Tech., Information Technology

Anna University, Tindivanam campus

Licenses & Certifications

Generative AI with Large Language Models

Coursera

Oct 2024

Certificate ID: 5XGK2Y4Q5KYT

Certificate Link

Recognition

Contact

Location

Chennai, Tamil Nadu, India