Ananth I. Sundararaj, Ph.D.

I report directly to the CTO and lead the Technical Program Management (TPgM) organization. This is a team of over 400 incredible colleagues who work across all Atlassian Products, Platforms and Infrastructure. The team encompasses Technical Program Management (TPM), Program Management (PgM) and Leadership Operations (LO). I am deeply inspired by the mission of helping unleash the potential of every TEAM. In addition, I serve as the Head of the Office of the CTO (OCTO). In this capacity, I partner closely with the CTO and other cross-functional leaders to define the company’s technology vision, foster innovation, drive collaboration, and act as a thought leader both within and beyond Atlassian.

In this role, I reported directly to the CTO and led the Technical Program Management (TPgM) organization. In early 2023 this consisted of the Program Management (PgM) & Leadership Operations (LO) crafts. To drive innovation in areas such as Cloud Infrastructure, Trust & Security, Data Engineering, Data Science, AI & Internal Tooling, I built the Technical Program Management (TPM) craft from the ground up. This involved defining roles and responsibilities, developing growth profiles, and staffing the team with industry-leading, deep domain experts. The TPgM organization grew to close to 300 talented colleagues who worked across all Atlassian products, platforms and infrastructure.

I was the VP of Product for a geo-distributed (spanning US, UK, India, China, Israel, Kenya, Brazil) organization across Microsoft Search, Assistant & Intelligence. I led a team of 100+ amazing product managers that partnered with 600+ Engineers/Data Scientists/Designers building Generative AI powered innovative products and features spanning search, recommendations, monetizable knowledge and AI platform.

Started Office 365's efforts in building compliant and responsible AI/ML powered contextual and personalized experiences into Microsoft 365 canvases (Outlook, Teams, SharePoint, Word, etc.) Jointly incubated from scratch a new business analytics and data platform team (IDEAs)for the entire Experiences & Devices division (1 of Microsoft's 4 engineering divisions back then). Jointly envisioned and built the go-to portal for customer and usage analytics for engineering, sales and marketing across the division (~50K people).

Founding member of the team that built the service fabric for running Office 365. My responsibilities spanned hardware supply chain, deployment systems (from once every 6 weeks to 3 times a day), automated change management (0 standing access), network architecture (100% network isolation and more), datacenter expansion (India, Japan, etc.) and other critical systems. Started from scratch (1 PM & 1 Engineer) an effort to create interoperability between Office 365 and Microsoft Bing. This allowed technologies (Entity extraction, Speller, Ranker, etc.) built for Bing to be reused in Office 365 without a rewrite. The team grew to 100+ colleagues and powered all rich intelligent scenarios in Office 365.

Founding member of the team that built out the service health stack as Exchange Online scaled from a friends & family program, doubling every 6 months to become the global scale Office 365 service that it is today.

Started as an Individual Contributor (IC) PM in the team that built Unified Messaging (UM) in Exchange Server 2010. UM was a monetized capability that combined voice and email messaging into one mailbox that could be accessed from different devices. UM became a top business driver and helped turn Exchange into a tremendously successful $2B+/year business at the time.

Built a cloud computing platform using operating system-level virtual machines and virtual networks to effectively host high performance distributed applications.

During my Ph.D. program at Northwestern University, I served as a Research Assistant (RA) and Teaching Assistant (TA) under my thesis advisor, Prof. Peter A. Dinda. In Fall 2004 and Fall 2005, I was the Teaching Assistant for EECS 339 - Introduction to Database Systems. This course introduced the underlying concepts behind data modeling and database systems using relational database management systems (RDBMS), the structured query language (SQL), and web applications (Perl DBI in CGI) as examples. As a TA, I conducted weekly recitation sections, held office hours, wrote and graded solutions for home works, exams and implementation based projects. I also lectured when Prof. Dinda was away on travel. Below, you can find my TA evaluation reports.

Thesis: Automatic, Run-time and Dynamic Adaptation of Distributed Applications Executing in Virtual Environments Advisor: Prof. Peter A. Dinda Co-designed and co-implemented an automatic, run-time and dynamic adaptation system for distributed applications executing in virtual environments

Thesis: Analytical Characterization of the Throughput of a Split TCP Connection Advisor: Prof. Dan Duchamp Developed an analytical characterization for the throughput of a split TCP connection and found the throughput to be increased due to pipiline parallelism.

Thesis: Designed and implemented algorithms for retargetable one-pass code generation. Advisors: Prof K.C. Navada & Prof. Priti Shankar (Indian Institute of Science, Bangalore, India) Designed and implemented algorithms for one-pass retargetable code generation