About
Hi. I’m Karan.
I’m a software engineer with a knack for entrepreneurship, privacy, and freedom of information.
I’ve worked at a few places: Google, Mattermark, Madrona Venture Labs, Lenskart.com. I graduated from the University of Washington with a degree in Computer Science in 2016.
In my free time, I read books, send tweets and toots, write a blog, and code. Sometimes, I also invest in startups.
Principles
In their essence, these principles will stay with me for a long time. Occasionally, I may reword them for clarity.
- Public information must be free and open
- Personal privacy and security are basic human rights
- Unchecked capitalism has failed us and our planet
- Ideological extremism is dangerous
- {F}OSS is better than closed-source
In line with these principles:
- This website does not spy on you
- This website has no ads or analytics
- This website is available on the Tor hidden network: not-currently-available
Brief Work History
- Senior Software Engineer - Present
- Tech lead for backend at a new, unannounced health platform (Fitbit).
- Senior Software Engineer - May ‘19 - Mar ‘21
- Tech lead for GKE on GCP (Control Plane -> Hardware Accelerator Platform -> K8s Node Platform).
- Previously, helped launch GKE On-Prem (Anthos) from EAP to GA growing into a Tech Lead.
- Software Engineer - June ‘16 - May ‘19
- Helped launch App Engine Flexible Environment under Google Cloud Platform.
Mattermark
- Software Engineering Intern Jan - Mar ‘16 - Seattle
- Worked with the data and engineering teams to write large-scale data ingest pipelines, ship web app features and build visualizations for the blog.
- Software Engineering Intern Jun - Sep ‘15 - Mountain View
- Worked with the Google Mobile Platform Developer Relations team to produce an open source playground for Google Cloud Messaging using Go (Golang), Polymer and Android and iOS.
Madrona Venture Labs
- Software Engineering Intern - Mar - Jun ‘15 - Seattle
- Worked with Madrona Venture Labs, a startup studio, to build ReplyYes.com - an ecommerce-over-text startup. Work included rapid prototyping in Rails and user testing.
- Software Engineering Intern - Jun - Sep ‘14 - Mountain View
- Worked with the Street View (Maps) team to make the data ingest pipeline more reliable and faster (for data center uploads).
Lenskart.com
- Data Analysis Intern - Jun - Aug ‘13 - New Delhi
- Worked as a Data Analyst and shipped two custom dashboards with realtime data streams using Tableau.
At the UW, I started the first, and the biggest, developer club - UW Hackers - to expose students to modern technology not present in the classroom. I also founded and lead the biggest student hackathon here - DubHacks (GeekWire coverage).
From Aug 2012 - Aug 2013, I assisted Jeff Huang as a Research Assistant. As part of the research, I collected data, ran statistical tests, visualized the findings and published a blog post about the results.