Sneha Gullapalli

Distributed Systems · Cloud & Platform Infrastructure · Observability

Principal Software Engineer

I design and ship large-scale distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and customer-facing platforms — and I work at the frontier of AI-assisted, spec-driven engineering. Nine years across observability, database orchestration, and high-scale product platforms.

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Portrait of Sneha Gullapalli
  • 9 yrsBuilding distributed systems
  • ~1 TB/dayTelemetry ingested at scale
  • ~40%Faster feature cycle time
  • 99.9%Cluster availability

What I do

Areas of focus

  • Distributed Systems & Databases

    Highly available database orchestration, self-healing reconciliation, and zero-downtime Day-2 operations on multi-node clusters.

  • Observability at Scale

    Platform-agnostic telemetry pipelines on OpenTelemetry and ClickHouse — ingesting ~1 TB/day of metrics, logs, and traces.

  • AI-Assisted, Spec-Driven Engineering

    Agent skills, workflows, and harnesses that turn written specs into reviewed, shipped features — cutting cycle time ~40%.

  • Cloud & Platform Infrastructure

    Kubernetes, Docker, and microservices; high-throughput REST APIs; CI/CD and release reliability across environments.

  • Full-Stack Product Delivery

    From backend services and licensing APIs to responsive React front ends serving millions of users.

  • Reliability & Evaluation for AI

    Evaluating LLM agents for grounding, safety, and task completion, with governance-aligned, statistically grounded reporting.

Where I've worked

Experience

Full experience →

Principal Software Engineer

Dell Technologies · Austin, TX

January 2024 — Present
  • Led design and delivery of a platform-agnostic, customer-facing observability stack (OpenTelemetry, ClickHouse, native UI) ingesting ~1 TB/day of metrics, logs, and traces — shifting customers from reactive troubleshooting to proactive monitoring; adopted across 8 Dell orgs.
  • Pioneered AI-assisted, spec-driven development as the team's standard practice — introduced agentic engineering tools (Claude Code, Codex, Devin, Windsurf) and defined the spec-first workflow.
  • Built a reusable library of agent skills, workflows, and harnesses that autonomously deliver end-to-end feature work — from scaffolding and implementation to tests and PRs — cutting feature cycle time by ~40%.
  • Architected the ClickHouse Cluster Manager Operator (CHOP) — a Rust-based, highly available database orchestrator managing multi-node ClickHouse and Keeper clusters with a self-healing reconciliation loop — cutting provisioning from hours to minutes at 99.9% cluster availability.
  • Rust
  • Go
  • ClickHouse
  • OpenTelemetry
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • Python
  • REST APIs

Previously

  • Senior Software Developer · PaycomDecember 2021 — December 2023

    Designed and shipped features for Paycom Learning — 1,000+ customizable courses, task/checklist management, and certificate tracking on a single-database HCM platform.

  • Software Developer II · PaycomJuly 2018 — December 2021

    Built and enhanced features for Paycom's mobile app and Manager-on-the-Go, enabling approvals, scheduling, and core workforce functions from any device.

  • Graduate Research Assistant · Kansas State University — KDD LabDecember 2016 — May 2018

    Applied NLP/ML to extract experimental data from scientific publications; built a web crawler processing thousands of PDFs (Java, Python, Scikit-learn).

AI & recognition

AI work & awards

All writing →

HackerNoon

Spec-Driven Development Is the New Developer Superpower

How spec-first workflows and agentic tooling turn written specifications directly into shipped features.

Open source · assevra.ai

Assevra AI — open-source reliability scorecard for LLM agents

Co-founder and contributor. Evaluates LLM agents across grounding, safety, PII leakage, and task completion, producing signed, offline-runnable reports with statistical confidence intervals and mapping to governance frameworks (EU AI Act, NIST AI RMF, ISO/IEC 42001).

Open source · GitHub

Rebound

Honesty-first résumé-tailoring plugin for Claude Code.

Awards & recognition

Open to new opportunities

I'm open to Senior / Staff / Principal engineering roles in distributed systems, platform infrastructure, and AI-assisted engineering. Let's talk.

Get in touch