SmartWAN Manager

Senior Lead Engineer
July 2016 – December 2017

At ADVA, I have been leading the development of SmartWAN Manager, a cloud-native, multi-tenant management plane built from scratch to serve ADVA’s SDN solution. The product delivers full FCAPS functionality, acting as a network controller that manages entities across distributed environments — a critical component in modern, scalable networking infrastructures.

This role has provided me the opportunity to shape the product’s architecture, processes, and engineering culture from the ground up while mentoring teams and ensuring delivery excellence in a rapidly evolving domain.

Roles:

  • Establish strong technical leadership for greenfield product development, collaborating closely with senior architects to define scalable solutions.
  • Own the architecture and design of product features while driving best-in-class development practices and clean code standards.
  • Expand requirements from the Product Owner and groom the Agile backlog for iterative, outcome-driven development.
  • Lead Agile demos, reinforcing feedback loops and ensuring steady progress toward product goals.

Major accomplishments:

  • Quickly ramped up on the ADVA Operating System platform, adapting to new paradigms and enabling seamless onboarding.
  • Replicated build systems and source management locally to kickstart PoCs for FCAPS-based network management solutions.
  • Delivered multiple proof-of-concepts such as Mobile Fault Management and Performance Management, validating platform capabilities.
  • Defined and implemented the Configuration Framework, ensuring consistent, scalable deployments.
  • Groomed the development team on Scala, AngularJS, and platform internals, fostering a culture of knowledge sharing and skill development.
  • Refined high-level epics into actionable backlog items, accelerating the development of SmartWAN Manager for SD-WAN use cases.
  • Implemented short feedback loops with pre-commit tests, unit tests, and integration tests, reinforcing code reliability.
  • Led efforts to keep code clean and maintainable, emphasizing refactoring and peer reviews at every stage.
  • Revamped the Web GUI layer, migrating from a proprietary Angular framework to an open React Material UI architecture, enhancing user experience and developer productivity.
  • Delivered around 8,000 lines of GUI code as a team of 3 over 8 sprints, while maintaining a 70%+ test coverage target without compromising delivery timelines.

Technologies used:

Scala, Akka Clusters, Maven, Apache Karaf, PaxExam, Zookeeper, RabbitMQ, AngularJS, ReactJS, Redux, Redux Forms, Redux Saga, Material-UI, Admin On Rest, React Create Scripts, Jest
Git, Gerrit, Jenkins, Artifactory
IntelliJ, Visual Source Editors