Venkataramarao Surapaneni
Principal, Enterprise Data Architect at Avalara
Bothell, Washington
Overview
Work Experience
Distinguished Architect/Senior Technical Director - Data Strategy, AI, and Cloud
2020 - Current
Recruited for 10+ years of data management, architecture, analytics, and governance leadership and experience. Collaborated with company stakeholders to transform data management across core platform services, serving the global needs of clients facing demanding state, local, and other tax obligations. ➡Notable Contribution In Strategy Leadership and Technology Innovation: 📌Lead architect for Avalara’s multi-cloud, AI-driven data platform (AWS, GCP, GCP) supporting high-volume, low-latency transactions across multiple cloud regions powering global tax compliance. 📌Championed Avalara’s global cloud transformation through Project Polaris & Active-Active (A-A) Architecture, ensuring scalability, AI-driven insights, and enterprise-wide compliance. 📌Designed & executed AI-first data strategies, optimizing cost, performance, and resiliency across AWS, GCP, and OCI. 📌Active member of Architect Review Board (ARB) Council that approves architecture changes, ensuring alignment with business needs. 📌Active in the Privacy and Security and AI Council, established privacy by design, security by design, and data governance frameworks to ensure compliance with GDPR, CCPA, and emerging AI regulations. ➡Strategic Impact Across Avalara 📌 Defined & executed enterprise data strategy to provide AI-driven insights & automation. 📌 Influenced $50M+ data & AI investments, ensuring Avalara’s leadership in tax automation innovation. 📌 Built, scaled, and led a global cross-functional engineering team on data engineering, AI/ML, Security & Compliance, Cloud Ops and Analytics projects, fostering a culture of innovation & excellence. ➡Dramatic Project Delivery Impact: 📌Improved system reliability by 99.99% uptime, reducing incident recovery time by 70%, operational costs by 30%, enabling real-time data ingestion, processing, and analytics across AWS & GCP & OCI cloud. 📌 Achieved 30% operational cost reduction & improved customer tax compliance accuracy by 25%.
Avalara is a cloud-based platform that provides tax compliance software and automated solutions.
Raised $341,010,991.00 from Susquehanna Growth Equity.
Principal Architect / Director, Data Engineering
2018 - 2020
Hired to lead a cross-functional team that implemented a high-stakes data recovery strategy within tight timelines for this software company that secured and managed corporate data. Mobile Iron was purchased by Ivanti in 2020. ➡Notable Accomplishments 📌 Designed & managed multi-tenant, multi-cloud data environments, ensuring high availability & scalability. 📌 Migrated legacy on-prem workloads to AWS/GCP, reducing operational costs by 35%. 📌 Achieved zero data integrity and ensured seamless transitions for end-users by migrating data from on-premises data centers to public cloud platforms and from AWS to multi-cloud. 📌 Delivered enhanced control over data privacy and security that met compliance standards through the design and architecture of an integrated data governance framework. 📌 Reduced processing times by 40% through optimization of ETL workflows and tools like Apache Airflow. 📌 Led the development of real-time analytics pipelines, delivering insights that increased operational efficiency. 📌 Collaborated with product teams to integrate AI/ML-driven insights into core business applications. 📌 Define, optimize, and monitor key DMO performance indicators (KPIs), regularly reporting on the effectiveness of data management and governance efforts to the executive sponsor/steering committee and the DMO Council.
Averail provides cloud-based, secure mobile content solutions that enable mobile employees to access, manage and share business content.
Raised $6,250,000.00 from Foundation Capital and Storm Ventures.
Principal Database Architect
2015 - 2018
Recruited to lead an Agile team that built core business applications in multi-cloud data centers using AWS and distributed SQL and NoSQL data clusters for this $4.9B Security Products Company. ➡Notable Accomplishments 📌 Ensured compliance with data regulations and enhanced data management capabilities by Implementing a data governance framework using Collibra. 📌Delivered data applications that aligned with requirements, successfully directing teams across multi-cloud environments (AWS, distributed SQL/NoSQL clusters).
Elastica offers data science powered SaaS app and cloud service security for companies of all sizes.
Raised $54,613,468.00 from Titanium Ventures, Third Point Ventures, Mayfield Fund, Pelion Venture Partners and BYU Cougar Capital.
Technical Lead, Data Platform (PostgreSQL, MySQL, MongoDB, ElasticSearch)
2013 - 2015
Hired to lead the Data & BI Engineering team at OpenTable, a software company with a restaurant reservation platform that grew to $15B in revenue in 2024. Enabled better data quality and accessibility for business analytics. ➡Notable Accomplishments 📌 Led the development of data governance frameworks, ensuring compliance with regulatory standards. 📌 Developed and enforced data security protocols to safeguard sensitive information, ensuring alignment with industry standards and GDPR and CCPA regulations, which increased client trust and operational resilience.
OpenTable operates as an online restaurant booking service that enables guests to discover and book tables.
Raised $48,000,000.00 from Comdisco Ventures, France Telecom (now Orange S.A.), Upstart Capital, Impact Venture Partners, Integral Capital Partners and Benchmark.
Sr. BI / SQL Server DBA
2011 - 2013
Align Technology, Inc. is a global medical-device company that pioneered the invisible-orthodontics, Invisalign system, a clear,orthodontic-treatment option for straightening teeth. ➡Notable Contributions 📌Worked on Incident and Change Management space supporting Align Live ID applications and databases for both Production and Integration environment. 📌Implemented Snapmirror, Snapvault, backups, creating and managing the disks through Snap Drive. 📌Analyzed usage of Disk I/O, CPU, Memory, and space utilization on instance level, Imported data from text files and excel spread sheets into SQL Server 2008 database using SSIS package. 📌Managed 100 + IIS webservers and 500 + SQL Servers including patching and software upgrades,Setting replication/Log shipping and high availability solutions for various client applications. 📌Provided Design, Architecture & Engineering support as well as on-call support for SQL Server databases and servers using SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008.
Align Technology, Inc. designs, manufactures, and markets the invisalign system for treating malocclusion or the misalignment of teeth.
Raised $136,000,000.00 from ABS Ventures, The Carlyle Group, Oak Hill Capital Partners, QuestMark Partners, Domain Associates and Kleiner Perkins.
Sr. SQL Server DBA Lead / Oracle DBA
2010 - 2011
Intuitive Surgical is the global leader in the rapidly emerging field of robotic-assisted minimally invasive surgery. The company is providing technology and procedural innovation across cardiac, urology, gynecologic, pediatric and general surgical disciplines through da Vinci System shipment. As part of IT Services & Support team, I supported & monitored all production & pre-production robotic live SQL Server & Oracle application databases. ➡Technical Responsibilities: 📌Design, Architecture & Engineering support as well as on-call support for SQL Server databases and servers using SQL Server 2000, 2005 and 2008. 📌Planned and designed new SQL Server implementations, server-to-server migrations, and upgrades, including database definition, structure, documentation, and long-term hardware and storage requirements. 📌Provided standardization and consistency across environments; design, implement, and monitor database functionality to ensure stable environments. 📌Designed storage strategies (ISCSI/SAN/NETAPP) and establish standards for complex database environments, physical structures, and specialized database applications. 📌Extensively worked on logical and physical database design, performance, scalability and tuning reviews/assessments (DB and SQL tuning), and query monitoring. 📌Regularly monitoring backup & restore jobs, refreshing test databases from production, deploying new applications, datacenter migrations, SSIS package creations, report generations. 📌Demonstrated advanced level experience with DTS, SSIS packages, T-SQL, SQL Reporting Services (SSRS), stored procedures, triggers, cursors, constraints, views, and power shell.
Senior SQL Server Production Support / Performance Tuning DBA
2010 - 2010
I supported Intuit’s ESTORE & LIGHTYEAR Live EASM (Enterprise Application System Management ) Data SQL Production / Pre-production Database Applications. In this role, I provided software build support & ongoing assistance with build activities to ensure timely delivery of testing, production software builds in a highly software development life cycle process & creation of cross-functional flow charts as part of Reverse Engineering.
Intuit Turbo is an app to get financial reports and financial advice.
Senior Production Support SQL Server DBA
2009 - 2010
I performed DB backups, restores ,clean-up & DB maintenance activities in a large like fragmentation / re-indexing, log file monitoring, statistics update, integrity checks, performance tuning, disaster recovery & cross group collaboration.
Energy Future Holdings Corp. is a Dallas-based, privately held energy company.
SQL Server Production & Developer DBA
2005 - 2009
Worked as MS SQL Server Production Support Database Administrator for Live Mission Critical Terabyte Databases and Application Support/Monitoring. Demonstrated proven abilities to direct and troubleshoot, database administration and network administration. ➡Notable Contributions: 📌Proven expert with SQL Server 2000/2005/2008, Windows 2003/2008 and: SQL Server Internals, Database fundamentals, RDBMS concepts, Performance Tuning and Optimization techniques. 📌Performed Physical database design, Development, Performance Tuning (with Profiler) and Query optimization (with Show Plan)
Microsoft Advertising provides digital advertising solutions.
Education
Master of Technology - MTech
2005 - 2006
BTech
2001 - 2005