Shyam Santhanam

Software Engineering Leader

Maryland, USA +1-425-241-0041 santhanamss@gmail.com github.com/shyamss www.algoluna.com

Summary

Software engineer and engineering leader with 20+ years building high-impact AI, cloud, data, and consumer products. Now focused on production AI systems and AI-assisted software development—creating agent harnesses that accelerate engineering without sacrificing quality, plus intelligent platforms for document understanding, search, media generation, and long-lived agent memory. Combines hands-on architecture with organization-wide leadership; delivered $10M in annual revenue, more than $3.3M in annual savings, and #1-ranked global launches.

Technical strengths

AI & ML
AI agents, large language model applications, retrieval-augmented generation, search and ranking, evaluation systems, document intelligence
Platforms
Distributed systems, reliable workflow orchestration, auditable event-driven systems, AI tool integrations, data pipelines, system monitoring
Engineering
AWS, GCP, Python, TypeScript, Java, C++, React, Node.js, Terraform, Docker, Playwright

Experience

Independent Software Consultant & AI Product Builder

Apr 2026–Present
  • AllegoryOS · Technical Lead: Joined AllegoryOS as technical lead, helping the Canadian InsurTech serve clients in Canada, the UK, and other international markets. In my most extensive real-world AI-assisted software development effort, built an effective AI-agent development harness and supporting tools that streamlined delivery and verified the quality of AI-generated code across the frontend, backend, cloud infrastructure, and testing. Architected and built an insurance document understanding system that extracts complex structured information from multi-page PDF, Word, and email documents in a few minutes with 95% overall and 100% critical-field accuracy.
  • Fukui Labs OS · Consulting AI Engineer: Built a company operating system for Fukui Labs, a pre-seed US AI media startup creating an AI-assisted world-building application for media studios. Applied and advanced cutting-edge techniques for long-lived AI-agent memory, using a semantic graph to connect company facts, relationships, decisions, and work over time. Designed an extensive operations interface that turns this knowledge into grounded briefings and safely coordinated automated work.
  • Agent Atlas · Personal project: Built a local-first CLI and interactive dashboard that turns Codex and Claude Code session logs into actionable views of project focus, agent workflows, token usage, and prompting patterns. Engineered bounded, privacy-preserving ingestion, multi-provider adapters, deterministic analytics, and explainable feedback without model calls, API keys, or runtime dependencies.
  • Subrosa · Personal project: Built a desktop privacy application that finds and reversibly hides personal and health information without sending documents to the cloud. Selected and tuned the on-device language models, made them smaller and faster through quantization, and benchmarked them across CPUs and GPUs.
  • Histos · Personal project: Built an AI production system for creating short explainers, music videos, and other multi-scene videos from scripts, images, audio, and generated clips. Its Codex integration keeps a complete project history, estimates and limits generation costs, and makes creative work easy to pause, resume, review, and audit.
  • Mythic Circuit · Personal project: Created an AI music YouTube channel featuring original videos produced with Histos. Grew the channel to more than 20,000 views and 100 subscribers within two months.

Amazon Web Services — Kumo · Senior Software Engineer

Jan 2024–Mar 2026
  • Architected and launched a search platform that supplies trusted company knowledge to three customer-service AI agents; replaced Amazon Kendra and saved $840K annually.
  • Led applied-science experiments that improved the relevance of retrieved information 60% and increased positive user feedback 50%.
  • Accelerated evaluation cycles 4–5× by making experiments resumable while strengthening platform availability, scalability, and operational visibility.

Amazon — Last Mile Delivery Technology · Senior Software Engineer

Jan–Dec 2023
  • Set architectural direction across a 100-person engineering organization and led modernization of scheduling and fleet-management platforms.
  • Designed an extensible payments platform projected to unlock approximately $10M over three years.
  • Automated trainee-driver entitlements to save $2M annually and designed scheduling controls that resolved UK compliance requirements.

Disney+ Hotstar — Customer Experience · Principal Engineer

Apr–Dec 2022
  • Directed architecture across discovery, search, authentication, and video teams for one of the world’s largest streaming platforms.
  • Improved app feedback 30%, reduced backend faults 80%, and closed a major competitive gap by delivering offline video in three months.
  • Established experimentation, analytics, and release foundations that enabled stable weekly deployments and faster product learning.

Disney+ Hotstar — Content Discovery · Senior Director of Engineering

Oct 2021–Mar 2022
  • Led a 30-person organization spanning backend, machine learning, and multi-platform client engineering.
  • Delivered the global Disney+ app launch to #1 rankings on Android and iOS while shaping product experience and go-to-market strategy with executive, product, and design leaders.

Rubrik — Jarvis Data & Observability Platform · Staff Engineer

Mar–Sep 2021
  • Led architecture for Jarvis, a unified analytics and system-monitoring platform spanning Rubrik’s cloud and on-premises infrastructure.

Amazon — PeopleInsight · Senior Software Development Engineer

May 2019–Mar 2021
  • Architected PeopleInsight, a workforce-analytics platform adopted across Amazon operations, and grew the program into multiple engineering teams.
  • Replaced third-party reporting with an internal platform that saved $500K annually and remained in production more than four years later.

Tala India · Senior Software Engineer

Dec 2018–Apr 2019
  • Re-architected backend services and data pipelines that collected customer and device signals for a mobile lending platform.

Amazon Lab126 — FireOS · Senior Software Engineer

Aug–Dec 2018
  • Delivered security components for FireOS and a new text-overlay content experience for Fire TV.

Amazon A9 · Senior Software Engineer

May 2016–Jul 2018
  • Built a real-time machine-learning prediction system for display-ad optimization that generated $10M in annual revenue and was featured at Amazon’s internal ML conference.

Earlier experience

Amazon Fulfillment Technologies · Software Engineer — Led a standardized fulfillment platform that integrated complex warehouse operations across India and Brazil.
2015–2016
Amazon Robotics · Software Engineer — Improved warehouse-robot operations through fail-safe asset tracking that cut inventory errors 20% and a bin-counting system that doubled audit throughput.
2014–2015
VMware · Senior Software Engineer — Expanded VMware’s hybrid-cloud service with programmable storage and automation for virtual machines.
2013–2014
MathWorks · Senior Software Engineer — Architected the highly available AWS foundation for delivering MATLAB as a scalable browser service.
2012–2013
VMware · Senior Member of Technical Staff — Helped take VMware’s first cloud-management platform from foundational design through production release.
2009–2012
TruePosition · Contract Software Developer — Created network-planning systems that modeled cellular deployments and optimized wireless-location accuracy.
2006–2009
GE Healthcare · Contract Software Developer — Built shared platform and network-security capabilities for connected medical instruments in a safety-critical environment.
2005–2006
Virtual Internet Africa · Chief Technical Officer — Built Botswana’s first free webmail and chat platform; its advertising-supported model made it the University of Botswana campus’s most popular site.
1998–2002

Education

M.S., Computer Science · Oklahoma City University 2004
B.S., Computer Science · University of Botswana 2002