MADHU JAYAKUMAR

Senior Software Engineer

Madhu Jayakumar

Headshot of Madhu Jayakumar

I build high-scale backend and data platforms that are reliable, cost-efficient, and designed for long-term product growth.

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  • 11+ years

    in production software engineering

  • 50M+

    artists served through analytics platforms

  • 7B/day

    rows ingested in high-throughput pipelines

Impact

Results that move the business

50M+

Artists and teams supported with production analytics at Spotify

7B rows/day

Ingested in ClickHouse pipelines while serving production workloads

1PB

Data tiered in Druid with sustained performance under peak demand

$840K/year

Infrastructure savings delivered through architecture and optimization

5+ engineers

Led directly as tech owner while shipping roadmap-critical systems

Peer Reviews

Trusted by the people who ship with me

"One of your superpowers is diagnosing, refining, and empathizing with customers' needs, even in high-stakes projects under time pressure."
Madeleine Product Manager
"Your ability to get up to speed with a system, assume ownership, and answer questions about it is unrivaled."
William Senior Engineer
"You organized swarms around Holocron and ClickHouse that led to solutions and knowledge sharing, and led both workstreams ahead of schedule."
Courage Staff Engineer
"Madhu clearly documented complex legacy pipelines and presented a solution that was understandable for both domain experts and non-technical partners."
Bennett Product Manager
"A steady pair of hands who can accomplish tasks quickly and surface risks that deserve the team's attention."
Austin Consultant
"You taught me a lot and helped me grow on the squad. You ran efficient team meetings with clear outcomes. You're really just a pleasure to work with"
Lindsey Consultant
"A great resource who responded quickly to questions and followed up by adding API support for specific needs."
Annie Data Engineer
"She did a great job onboarding our team and was actively involved in load testing to help resolve latency concerns."
Eileen Backend Engineer
"Provided docs and quick responses, jumped in whenever we hit a roadblock, and wrote strong first-pass PRs with clear handoff docs."
Abby Senior Engineer
"As a lead instructor and TA, Madhu was clear, concise, and prepared, and played a big part in the course's success. I was impressed with her natural teaching abilities."
Jhanae Education Program Manager

Education

Academic foundation

Cornell University

B.S. in Electrical and Computer Engineering

Minor in Computer Science

Hunter Rawlings Presidential Research Scholar

Sep 2008 - Jun 2012

Work

Career Trajectory

Capital One

Platform Integration Lead, Senior Software Engineer

Feb 2025 - Present

Building AWS fulfillment microservices with Lambda, Step Functions, DynamoDB, and resilient service integrations.

Spotify

Tech Owner & Senior Software Engineer, Data & Backend

Aug 2020 - Jan 2025

Delivered large-scale analytics platforms for Spotify for Artists, including high-volume data pipelines and cost-efficient infrastructure.

Yext

Software Engineer, Full-Stack

Jul 2014 - Jul 2020

Joined a 30-person engineering team and built platform capabilities through the company's IPO and subsequent public-company scale.

Internships

Arista

Software Engineer Intern

Jun 2012 - Sep 2012

Experience

Building products at scale

Capital One

Platform Integration Lead, Senior Software Engineer

Feb 2025 - Present
  • Building fulfillment microservices on AWS using Lambda, Step Functions, and DynamoDB to orchestrate customer-facing workflows.
  • Designing resilient integrations across REST and SOAP services with strong observability and operational safeguards.
  • Driving production excellence through CI/CD practices and tooling including Jenkins, GitHub, JIRA, PagerDuty, Splunk, and New Relic.

Spotify

Tech Owner & Senior Software Engineer, Data & Backend

Aug 2020 - Jan 2025
  • Tech owner for a team of 5 engineers and 3 consultants, guiding technical roadmap and platform health.
  • Built an OLAP platform with ClickHouse and backend APIs powering Spotify for Artists insights used by 50M+ artists and teams worldwide.
  • Scaled ClickHouse from 2TB to 20TB, ingesting 7B rows/day while serving 500 RPS in production.
  • Delivered data pipelines for 7 Artist Wrapped stories from BigTable using Beam and Parquet.
  • Implemented Druid tiering for 1PB of data and reduced infrastructure spend by $840K annually while sustaining up to 3x peak traffic.

Yext

Software Engineer, Full-Stack

Jul 2014 - Jul 2020
  • Joined Yext when engineering was about 30 people and contributed through a major scale-up phase as the company matured into public-company operations.
  • Led a team of 5 engineers migrating analytics pipelines from AWS Data Pipeline and Python to a Java-based platform with stronger reliability and monitoring.
  • Built analytics products with Elasticsearch and Redshift and developed AnalyticsServer to expose insights across the Yext ecosystem.
  • Led a major refactor in the Yext Pages platform to support service-area directories, and built demo Android/iOS apps for clients.

Princeton University

Teaching Assistant

Sep 2012 - Jun 2014
  • Taught a "Principles of Computer System Design" to a class of 25 students, with office hours, mentorship, and coursework evaluation.
  • Covered topics in C, Assembly, buffer overrun attacks, heap manager internals, Unix shell, and operating systems.

Skills

Technical toolkit

Research

Selected research

Leadership & Mentoring

  • Tech owner and mentor for engineering teams at Spotify
  • Instructor for Spotify Data Engineering course
  • TA for Princeton Systems Engineering course
  • Volunteer high school CS teacher with Microsoft TEALS
  • Mentor/advisor with Built By Girls

Contact

Let's Connect

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