Vijay Neelakandan

Chief Technology Officer

Vijay Neelakandan is an experienced engineering leader with a career spanning over 18 years, specializing in building scalable and highly available distributed systems. He has a strong focus on developing fault-tolerant systems, analyzing customer behavior and telemetry, and employing agile product development methodologies. Throughout his career, Vijay has managed cross-functional teams comprising engineers, product managers, and UX designers. He has successfully defined strategies and implemented solutions to scale products to millions of users. Additionally, Vijay is an accomplished people manager, with 15 years of experience in building, retaining, mentoring, and promoting talent.

During his tenure as a Head of Engineering at Google, Vijay played a pivotal role in shaping the company's technological advancements. He led four engineering teams consisting of over 70 software engineers, DevSecOps engineers, and security engineers. His teams were responsible for building infrastructure to monitor the security and compliance of Google Cloud products. Vijay's team orchestrated and analyzed over 100,000 threat vectors and compliance checks daily. The data generated by his team was used by over 10,000 users across Google to ensure compliance and security in their GCP products. He collaborated with operations, product, engineering, and data science teams to enhance automated controls and models, reducing false positives and increasing detection rates. He also worked closely with product and engineering leadership to enable the adoption of security tools and best practices for shipping secure products and features. Furthermore, Vijay established data governance and risk management processes in partnership with legal, privacy, and compliance teams, ensuring a compliant infrastructure for customers. He possesses in-depth knowledge of ISO 27001/27002 and the NIST Cybersecurity Framework.

Prior to his role at Google, Vijay served as a Senior Engineering Manager at Microsoft. During his tenure, he worked on various projects within Microsoft, including Skype, Bing Ads, and Microsoft Outlook. For Skype, Vijay led the design, implementation, and launch of the Skype notification manager. He migrated legacy code from on-premises to Azure, rewriting the entire stack in C# and seamlessly transitioning Skype clients to the new stack with zero downtime. He also architected a custom Geo-Synchronization data layer on Azure for pushing notifications across multiple data centers, handling millions of transactions per hour. At Bing Ads, Vijay was responsible for designing and implementing the display ads delivery framework for Windows 8, successfully rewriting the entire stack to meet tight launch deadlines. For Microsoft Outlook, he oversaw 14.x product release cycles, partnered with architecture and product management teams to set and implement product roadmaps for the next version of Mac Outlook.

Vijay also has entrepreneurial experience as a co-founder and developer at Rentabls Inc. He led the launch and growth of the business, enabling fitness enthusiasts to try out fitness bands and gear before purchasing them. Vijay designed the cloud-based architecture and wrote a majority of the code.

Vijay holds a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering, which he obtained from Coimbatore Institute of Technology, India.