Natarajan Pillai

Improved security, observability, and request-path correctness for AWS S3 ShardStore, a distributed storage system handling millions of requests per hour.

• Led a Rust migration from long-lived IAM user credentials to hourly auto-rotating IAM role credentials across ShardStore AWS accounts, improving credential security and reducing exposure from static access keys.
• Migrated logging from a single shared global AWS account handling ~1.35M requests/hour to 20+ regionalized accounts handling 3.5K requests/hour each, reducing per-account load by 386x and saving 5 developer hours/month in log retrieval.
• Implemented shard-index validation across data request paths, verifying correct shard metadata during transfer and improving request integrity.
• Expanded automated unit and integration test coverage for critical production-path changes, catching regressions earlier in the pipeline and reducing production issues by ~60%.
• Developed a stress testing framework for data request paths, simulating concurrent request patterns to validate ShardStore reliability under realistic load.
• Built monitoring dashboards and automated canaries, reducing false alarms by 20% and improving early detection of production issues.

Architected and built the backend for a Kanban dashboard with modular design, authentication, and role-based access control.

• Architected the backend for a Kanban dashboard, designing a modular Express.js system with JWT authentication and role-based access control (RBAC).
• Engineered secure REST APIs for project management workflows with business logic for task assignments, status updates, permissions, and error handling, reducing bugs by 35%.
• Deployed backend services on AWS EC2 with MongoDB for persistence, while validating scalability under high traffic through load testing.

Built automation tools and led cloud migration of legacy systems, improving processing efficiency and infrastructure reliability.

• Developed a Python-based OCR tool using Tesseract, reducing applicant processing time from 10 minutes to 2 minutes and streamlining legal data workflows.
• Migrated legacy internal applications to AWS using EC2, RDS, and S3, modernizing infrastructure while improving scalability and reliability.

Built and shipped Java-based Android applications with real-time capabilities, serving 10,000+ users.

• Built a Java-based Android event management platform with Firebase Cloud Messaging for real-time notifications, supporting 10,000+ users and improving event engagement by 25%.
• Developed modular Android shopping and food delivery apps, integrating backend APIs for product catalogs, order flows, and dynamic content, contributing to a 20% increase in client retention.