Mahendran Vasagam

Staff Software Engineer

Software Engineer

I'm a Staff Software Engineer at Slack, building scalable data platform infrastructure. I focus on systems that help teams ship reliably and move faster. When I'm not at the keyboard, I'm exploring new tech and sharing what I learn.

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Experience

Slack Staff Software Engineer Feb 2021 - Present · San Francisco, California, USA
  • Data @ Scale: building scalable data platform infrastructure that powers product and analytics.
  • Tech: Kafka Streams, Airflow, Data Pipelines, Apache Spark, Trino, Big Data Analytics, CDC, Hadoop, Iceberg.
  • Focus on software infrastructure and reliability for high-throughput, low-latency systems.
Armorblox (now part of Cisco) Principal Software Engineer May 2019 - Jan 2021 · Cupertino, California, USA · On-site
  • Principal engineer building data infrastructure powering AI-driven email security; core technology led to Cisco acquisition in 2023.
  • Architected real-time data ingestion pipelines processing millions of emails daily across Microsoft 365, Gmail, and Slack.
  • Designed distributed data processing with Kafka Streams for natural language understanding model inference at scale; built ML feature extraction pipeline supporting LLMs for threat detection.
  • Implemented data governance and compliance infrastructure for GDPR and SOC2; technical leadership for platform engineering serving enterprise customers.
  • Infrastructure enabled 10x scale increase while reducing inference latency by 40%; platform processed 5M+ emails daily with sub-second ML inference.
McAfee (Skyhigh Networks, acquired by McAfee) Member Of Technical Staff May 2012 - May 2019 · Santa Clara, California, USA
  • Early/founding engineer at Skyhigh Networks building industry-leading cloud security products from the ground up; scaled from 0 to 500+ customers including Fortune 500 before McAfee acquisition in 2018.
  • Shadow IT & Cloud Security: architected end-to-end data analytics and multi-tenant platform detecting unmanaged cloud usage; built data processing handling billions of cloud events daily; compliance engine for GDPR, HIPAA, PCI-DSS; threat detection for insider threats and anomalies.
  • Identity Management: developed services that became core infrastructure across product lines; built auth layer for multi-product cloud security suite; unified identity framework used by multiple Skyhigh products.
  • Technical lead for analytics infrastructure; led architecture for microservices platform handling petabyte-scale data; mentored engineers on distributed systems, big data, cloud security.
  • Infrastructure processed 10B+ security events daily by 2018; Gartner named Skyhigh a Leader in Magic Quadrant for CASB.
Cisco Systems Senior Software Engineer Mar 2008 - May 2012 · California, USA
  • Senior engineer on 4 major Cisco security products; core contributor to platforms still in production 13–20+ years later.
  • Identity Services Engine (ISE): co-owned network service framework for Cisco's flagship zero-trust NAC platform; built authentication/authorization engine as policy decision point; device profiling and policy enforcement; deployed to 5,000+ enterprises, foundation of Cisco zero-trust strategy.
  • Cisco Security Manager (CSM) Event Monitoring: technical lead; designed GUI layer and data model from scratch; owned frontend application; backend syslog parser for threat detection across ASA, IPS/IDS, FWSM; threat visualization processing millions of security events daily.
  • IPS Manager Express & ASDM: owned dashboard frameworks and reporting for two management products; delivered IME 7.0.1/7.0.2; botnet filtering, threat detection, reputation efficacy; ASDM remains primary GUI for Cisco ASA firewalls (20+ years in production).
eBay ODC Software Developer Feb 2007 - Mar 2008 · Offshore Development Center
  • Senior Developer at eBay ODC contributing to eBay.com platform serving billions of user hits globally.
  • Site Email Code Consolidation (Lead): led email consolidation project; architected consistent code library for site-wide email standards; batch process for digest emails and bulk notifications.
  • eBay Express: developed View Item integration and seller promotion; optimized traffic and scalability for millions of daily page views; built integration for Shopping.com products on eBay Express.
  • MyeBay User Preferences Redesign: re-engineered preferences page with V4 framework; batch notification system for buyers/sellers; J2EE, XML/XSL, JMS, batch processes at massive scale.
HCL Technologies Ltd. Member Of Technical Staff Nov 2004 - Feb 2007 · India
  • J2EE developer on complex enterprise financial systems for global clients.
  • Developed Entitlements and Market Order Processing Systems for financial services; components for transaction processing and access control; high-reliability applications with strict compliance.
  • Re-engineered legacy Delphi application to modern tiered J2EE web architecture; led migration to industry-standard Java; reduced maintenance costs and improved scalability.

Projects

MuleRun

Run and orchestrate workflows at scale.

AgentKit

Build production-ready AI agents, fast.

Writora AI

AI-powered blogs with media — create high-quality blog posts from video and audio in seconds.

Feel free to explore my GitHub for more projects. Most of them are open-source.