Five years at Microsoft on Azure SQL — Hyperscale control plane, then Serverless. Fastest promotion to Senior on the team; led a group of 6. I owned features end-to-end across India and US teams: design, rollout, on-call, billing, and customer-facing reliability.
Azure SQL DB Serverless · Mar 2022 – Aug 2025
Core workflow contributor and primary stakeholder for Serverless products — pause/resume infrastructure, metadata workflows, and billing systems.
LPv3 — Logical Pause/Resume
Feature owner and technical lead for LPv3, the third-generation pause/resume system for serverless databases.
- Enabled 48K+ logical pause/resume operations daily with sub-second latency; 60% reduction in workflow latency for customers waking paused databases
- Fixed reliability failures causing flickering from firewall errors; resolved metadata discrepancies during resume workflows
- Built dashboards and RCA documentation to track overbilling and latency trends
- Research published at SIGMOD 2024 on proactive resource pause/resume
Utility DB for firewall rules
Architected a regional Utility DB to cache firewall rules — reducing unnecessary master activations and compute COGS.
- Intercepted ARM API calls and redirected to Utility DB, cutting activation churn
- Designed deactivation workflows with race-condition handling and fallback paths
- Led threat model reviews with security teams; built alerting for data integrity and latency
Activation latency & on-call
- Investigated user DB activation latency and master DB dependencies; proved parallel activation behavior with real-time dashboards
- Validated that master deactivation doesn't hurt user DB latency — enabling broader rollout of cost-saving deactivation
- On-call for Sev-2/Sev-3 incidents: resume failures, metadata corruption, broken logical DB states from compute exhaustion
- Built observability and auto-mitigation runners; led RCAs and shipped fixes for duplicate activity logs and pause latency propagation
Billing & shipped products
- Migrated billing logic from Storage V1 to V2; reduced overbilling risk by refining logical resume triggers
- Found and fixed billing bugs — wrote runners around under- and over-billing logic
- Shipped Azure SQL DB Free offer (Spinnaker) end-to-end
- Shipped Trident Native SQL in Microsoft Fabric with Power BI integration
- Designed features across modules; exposed APIs consumed by microservices
Azure SQL DB Hyperscale · Jun 2020 – Feb 2022
Hyperscale control plane regional expert — backend systems for write-heavy customers at scale.
- Auto-scaling page servers for customers migrating to Hyperscale
- File-system configuration management via automated workflows
- Automated reliable rollouts to Hyperscale's storage engine; billing logic to prevent incorrect charges during migration
- Management service committer; production incident mitigation and root-cause analysis
What I took away
How to own distributed backend systems at scale — design for latency, COGS, and reliability together; build observability that makes on-call survivable; and ship customer-facing products (Free tier, Fabric integration) while keeping the infrastructure underneath honest.