Ram Srivatsa Kannan

I design and lead mission-critical software platforms that operate at scale across teams and organizations at Netflix. Specialized in applying distributed systems and database fundamentals to drive architectural clarity, operational excellence, and long-term system evolution.

What I Do

Distributed Systems & Databases

I specialize in distributed systems, database internals, and systems performance. I act as a technical owner and decision-maker for complex initiatives, leading zero-to-one efforts and guiding cross-functional teams. I balance hands-on system design and implementation with mentorship, stakeholder alignment, and delivery of durable, production-grade solutions.

South Indian Percussion

I am fortunate to be an ardent student of Carnatic Music under the tulage of mridangam vidwan B. Vijayan. I wish to devote my spare cycles after my day job playing and listening to Indian Classical Music.

Affiliations

Resume

12+ Years of Experience

Education

Sept 2013 – Dec 2018
University of Michigan
Ann Arbor

Ph.D. in Computer Science and Engineering

Thesis: Enabling Fairness in Cloud Computing Infrastructure
Advisors: Professor Jason Mars and Professor Lingjia Tang

Sept 2009 – May 2013
Anna University
MIT, Chrompet

B.S. in Information Technology

Thesis: SCOC IP design for Application Specific Architectures
Advisor: Prof. Venkateswaran Nagarajan

Experience

Feb 2023 - Present
Netflix Inc.

Software Engineer - Tech Lead

Leading the Online Data Stores team working on SQL, NoSQL, Caching, and Abstractions. Key projects include: Scaling Stateful Services for Big Bet Live Events, Building Relational Database Abstractions, Right-Sizing the NoSQL Fleet, Aurora PostgreSQL Migration, and Relational Database Fleet Management (1,000+ production clusters).

Aug 2020 - Feb 2023
Yugabyte Inc.

Core Database Engineer

Core Database R&D Team. Implemented automatic shard splitting, selective update optimization, safe OOM handling, and optimized nested loop joins by batching RPCs (7x performance improvement).

March 2019 - Aug 2020
Uber Technologies Inc.

Software Engineer

Developer Platforms Team. Designed and implemented Shadow, a shadow-traffic system to validate microservices against live production traffic in isolated environments.

Talks and Publications

Talks and Publications

Talks

AWS re:Invent 2024

How Netflix autopilots migration from Amazon RDS to Aurora at scale
Slides

Roachfest 2024

How Netflix enables CockroachDB-as-a-service
Promo | Full talk

Publications

ACM TACO 2019

Caliper: Interference Estimator for Multi-tenant Environments Sharing Architectural Resource
Ram Srivatsa Kannan, Michael Laurenzano, Jeongseob Ahn, Jason Mars, Lingjia Tang

EuroSys 2019

GrandSLAm - Guaranteeing SLAs for Microservices executing in Serverless Computing Infrastructures
Ram Srivatsa Kannan, Lavanya Subramanian, Ashwin Raju, Jeongseob Ahn, Jason Mars, Lingjia Tang
In Proceedings of the The European Conference on Computer Systems (EuroSys), 2019

ISPASS 2018

Proctor: Identifying Interference in Shared datacenters
Ram Srivatsa Kannan, Animesh Jain, Michael A. Laurenzano and Lingjia Tang and Jason Mars
In Proceedings of the International Symposium on Performance Analysis of Systems and Software (ISPASS), 2018

ASPLOS 2017

Prophet: Precise QoS Prediction on Non-Preemptive Accelerators to Improve Utilization in Warehouse Scale Computers
Quan Chen, Hailong Yang, Minyi Guo, Ram Srivatsa Kannan, Jason Mars and Lingjia Tang
In Proceedings of the International Conference on Architectural Support for Programming Languages and Operating Systems (ASPLOS) 2017

ISVLSI 2013

Performance and energy efficient cache system design: Simultaneous execution of multiple applications on heterogeneous cores
Venkateswaran Nagarajan, Kartik Lakshminarasimhan, Akash Sridhar, Prashanth Thinakaran, Rajagopal Hariharan, Vinesh Srinivasan, Ram Srivatsa Kannan, Aswin Sridharan Jason Mars and Lingjia Tang
In Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI

ISVLSI 2012

Compilation Accelerator on Silicon
Venkateswaran Nagarajan, Vinesh Srinivasan, Ram Srivatsa Kannan, Prashanth Thinakaran, Rajagopal Hariharan, Bharanidharan Vasudevan, Nachiappan Chidambaram Nachiappan, Karthikeyan Palavedu Saravanan, Aswin Sridharan, Vigneshwaran Sankaran, Vignesh Adhinarayanan, VS Vignesh, Ravindhiran Mukundrajan
In Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI

ISVLSI 2012

Scoc IP cores for custom built supercomputing nodes
Venkateswaran Nagarajan, Rajagopal Hariharan, Vinesh Srinivasan, Ram Srivatsa Kannan, Prashanth Thinakaran, Vigneshwaren Sankaran, Bharanidharan Vasudevan, Ravindhiran Mukundrajan, Nachiappan Chidambaram Nachiappan, Aswin Sridharan, Karthikeyan Palavedu Saravanan, Vignesh Adhinarayanan, Vignesh Veppur Sankaranarayanan
In Proceedings of the IEEE Computer Society Annual Symposium on VLSI

TrustCom 2012

Random4: an application specific randomized encryption algorithm to prevent SQL injection
Srinivas Avireddy, Narayan Gowraj, Ram Srivatsa Kannan, Prashanth Thinakaran, Prasanna Ranganathan, Sundaravadanam Ganapathi, Jashwant Raj Gunasekaran and Sruthi Prabhu
In Proceedings of the IEEE International Conference on Trust, Security and Privacy in Computing and Communications

Contact

Get in Touch

734-741-3242

San Jose, CA

ramsrivats@gmail.com

How Can I Help You?