Vivek Nair

Senior Engineering Manager @ Twilio

About

I am an engineering leader who thrives at the intersection of complex distributed systems and high-growth team dynamics. My career has been defined by a deep-seated interest in the "engine under the hood" i.e. from building the high-availability VoIP and real-time media infrastructure that powers global communications to orchestrating the massive-scale deployment platforms that support them.Currently, at Twilio, I lead the team responsible for deployment orchestration across 20,000+ instances and 1,800+ microservices. My domain expertise is rooted in the "Zero-Downtime" mindset required for real-time systems. Whether it’s managing SIP trunking routing for emergency 911 services or scaling Argo CD for thousands of daily deployments, I focus on building systems that are resilient, observable, and developer-friendly. In 2024, I led an initiative that reduced my teams’ pager burden by over 50% while maintaining a rigorous P99 MTTA of under 5 minutes.My leadership philosophy is built on the belief that technical excellence and inclusive culture are inseparable. I have a proven track record of growing talent at all levels, from mentoring early-in-career engineers in the Hatch apprenticeship program to managing principal engineers through complex migrations like the Amazon Linux 2023 base OS upgrade. Outside the office, I bring this same focus on advocacy and community building to my work as a Board Member for Trikone, supporting the South Asian LGBTQ+ community in the Bay Area.

Country

United States

City

San Francisco Bay Area

Industry

Computer Software

Skill

Engineering Leadership, Platform Engineering, Operational Excellence, Anthropic Claude, Google Gemini, ChatGPT, Stakeholder Management, Talent Development, Strategic Planning, Developer Experience, Agile Methodologies, Scrum, Jira, PagerDuty, Infrastructure as code (IaC), Terraform, Kubernetes, DevOps, Microservices, AWS Auto Scaling

Experience

Senior Engineering Manager

Twilio

2021-9 - Present · 5 yrs 1 mo

San Francisco Bay Area

◾️Own the deployment orchestration platform engineering domain across 5 business verticals ◾️ Operate 10 components managing deploys across AWS EC2 virtual machines and EKS clusters ◾️ Managed 10 software engineers across 2 teams including 6 L5 principal individual contributors ◾️ Reduced deployment latency for AWS EC2 virtual machine deployments from 25 to 10 minutes ◾️ Stabilized proprietary EC2 VM provisioning and orchestration engines for 20,000+ instances ◾️ Built bespoke Buildkite based Argo CD orchestration supporting 2,000+ deployments per day ◾️ Maintain proprietary continuous delivery pipelines orchestrator supporting 500+ runs per day ◾️ Operationalized Terraform Cloud to support Infrastructure as Code workflows for 350+ teams ◾️ Operate 4 production Argo CD instances across Comms, Segment, and SendGrid business units ◾️ Facilitated Amazon Linux 2023 base OS upgrade across all of Twilio for 1800+ microservices ◾️ Reduced teams’ pager burden by >50% in 2024 (~1500 to ~750) with a P99 MTTA of 90 seconds ◾️ Average manager effectiveness score of +78 in 2024 measuring manager support and guidance

Engineering Manager

Twilio

2017-4 - 2021-10 · 4 yrs 7 mos

San Francisco Bay Area

◾️Created 43 software engineering positions through launching the Hatch apprenticeship ◾️ Maintained overall program NPS of +65 across all apprentices, managers, and mentors ◾️ Converted >95% of 6 cohorts of apprentices to full-time software engineering positions ◾️ Developed onboarding curriculum incorporating instructional and project-based learning

Software Engineer

Twilio

2015-8 - 2017-4 · 1 yr 9 mos

San Francisco Bay Area

◾️Designed, built, and operated VoIP and real-time media infrastructure for voice products ◾️ Developed emergency 911 configuration and routing system for SIP trunking customers ◾️ Designed distributed system to monitor customer and carrier endpoints for downtime ◾️ Participated in 24x7 on-call rotation to maximize service availability for all customers

Community Advisor

Carnegie Mellon University

2014-1 - 2015-5 · 1 yr 5 mos

Greater Pittsburgh Area

◾️ Led a team of resident assistants for a building of 84 male first-year students ◾️ Set shared vision and direction for growth and development of staff and community ◾️ Planned house-wide events and managed a budget to implement house vision ◾️Responded to community incidents, emergencies and issue escalations from staff

Resident Assistant

Carnegie Mellon University

2012-8 - 2014-5 · 1 yr 10 mos

Greater Pittsburgh Area

◾️ Developed meaningful 1:1 relationships and community for 28 male first-year residents ◾️ Advised and mentored residents through their transition from high-school to college ◾️ Led house council and service groups as focus areas of the house experience ◾️ Responded to community emergencies and mediated conflict in the floor community

iSTEP Research Intern

Carnegie Mellon University

2013-5 - 2013-8 · 4 mos

Bengaluru Area, India

◾️ Part of 8-member field research team developing assistive technology for teaching Braille ◾️ Developed firmware for a Braille teaching aid for use at Mathru School for the Blind ◾️ Created common libraries to enable rapid prototyping of functional modes by third parties ◾️ Conducted user testing with faculty and students to inform development cycle

Software Engineering Intern

Twilio

2014-5 - 2014-8 · 4 mos

San Francisco Bay Area

◾️ Developed routing infrastructure as a member of the SIP voice connectivity team ◾️ Implemented update validation and rollback system to protect call routing tables ◾️ Designed subsystem for failsafe routing in case of dependency outages ◾️ Created logging and integration testing frameworks to monitor changes to routes and code

Software Intern

NMSWorks Software (P) Ltd.,

2012-6 - 2012-7 · 2 mos

Chennai Area, India

◾️ Prototyped VoIP network probe to identify network issues and bottlenecks in telecom networks ◾️ Developed real-time SIP probe with WireShark-backend packet capture for further analysis ◾️ Scaled system into a concurrent design to handle 200Mb/s of signalling data to meet POC spec ◾️ Implemented RADIUS accounting to centralize CDR storage to analyze multiple node