Sid Bala Email & Phone Number

San Francisco Bay Area

As the Area Tech Lead for AI Frontiers at Asana, I drive innovation and empower teams to deliver cutting-edge AI features that transform the future of work. Prior to leading AI Frontiers, I spearheaded Asana's first LLM Tiger team, personally driving the development of Smart Answers and Smart Status, two groundbreaking AI features. My contributions led to the filing of 4 AI-related patents under my name.In my current role, I lead skilled teams of engineers, designers, and product managers in an engineer-led innovation model. We rapidly ideate, prototype, and validate AI solutions, collaborating closely with leadership and product teams.Projects I've led:- Multi-agents architectures (2 architectures)- Cognitive architectures (Chain-of-Thought, ReAct etc)- Enterprise knowledge graphs (4 iterations of architectures) - RAG with heterogeneous modalities- Human feedback and self-correction / self-learning- UX around brain/thought editing for steering LLMsThrough strategic proposals and presentations, I secure alignment and excitement from leadership, enabling the team to further develop and test these innovative features with internal alpha users. By gathering feedback from internal users and collaborating with UX researchers, I ensure that our AI solutions do indeed address actual customer needs.As these innovative prototypes achieve internal usage, I work closely with product teams to integrate them into their product surfaces. By way of building reusable LLM-frameworks for product engineers, along with comprehensive design docs, I facilitate a smooth handoff, empowering these teams to further develop these ideas into groundbreaking end-user features.My unique combination of technical expertise, strategic thinking, and cross-functional collaboration allows me to drive AI innovation at Asana, redefining the possibilities of AI in the workplace and ultimately delivering unparalleled value to our customers.

Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada

Backend Engineering Lead for foundational infrastructure that powers Dialpad.Also led several projects in Telephony - building specific capabilities in the core WebRTC/VOIP/SIP/SDP telcom services to support new product features built by the front-end teams. My team shipped multi-party video during my tenure at Dialpad.Designed and led team to build Fleet Manager - a distributed, fault-tolerant bare metal server orchestrator that manages all of Dialpad's worldwide telcom/POP infrastructure. With built-in observability, automatic fault correction capabilities, these initiatives drove critical business metrics around uptime & MTTR for our infra and networking teams.

Vancouver

buddybuild was acquired by Apple! The core infrastructure & SDKs I built here are now 𝙓𝙘𝙤𝙙𝙚 𝘾𝙡𝙤𝙪𝙙 and 𝙏𝙚𝙨𝙩𝙁𝙡𝙞𝙜𝙝𝙩!As a founding engineer, I built most of buddybuild's core infrastructure - from architecting the high-level distributed systems architecture to deciding on technology choices and then ultimately designing and building on those technologies.• Architected buddybuild as a multi-tier distributed system using technologies such as Node.js, GoLang, Python, Docker, Linux and AWS/EC2.• Designed and built out VMManager - a distributed subsystem that forms the foundation of buddybuild and manages the provisioning and destruction of transient virtual machines that are used for every build in buddybuild. Scaled this up to handle full daytime production load. VMManager is performant, highly fault-tolerant and self-healing. Technologies used: GoLang, python, VMWare and NoSQL/MongoDB.• Envisoned, ideated and built and developer-evangelized buddybuild SDK including revolutionary features such as InstantReplay. • Drove and managed the security engineering effort at buddybuild. From patching vulnerabilities in the backend stack to instutionalizing security best practices in the team. I was also responsible for hiring and managing an external security pen-testing team, negotiating contracts, formulating and communicating engineering requirements.• Drove hiring efforts for DevOps engineering at buddybuild.

Vancouver, Canada Area

Rebuilt from the ground up, the performance measurement and instrumentation effort at Silk Web Browser.• Build a distributed high-throughput web crawler on EC2 + message queues to create baselines for pageload times across 1 million URLs every hour.• Architected, designed and implemented a unified instrumentation framework for measuring the page load performance of the browsers across iOS, Android and FireOS.• Designed and built a hardware Bluetooth HID input device to drive automation into iOS/MobileSafari• Implemented a distributed test lab infrastructure on AWS/EC2 to run fleets of mobile devices concurrently.I also worked within AWS RDS, building features such as MySQL synchronous replication.

Redmond, Washington, United States

• Developed several foundational features in the Modern Developer Platform from Windows Desktop to Windows Phone.• Designed and implemented WinRT/XAML API surfaces for Databinding, Parsing, Graphics and Media.• Built converged WinRT instrumentation and metrics infrastructure to allow extraction and analytics of KPIs Desktop and on Phone.• Drove performance investigations for XAML Parsing memory and CPU usage right down to the kernel scheduler level using kernel trace logging.• Mentored interns, ramping them up quickly on the codebase and internal processes.

Redmond, Washington, United States

Windows/OS Group

Vancouver, Canada Area

Ultrasound 3D Raytracing for Epidural Needle Insertion- 3D visualization software to help doctors deliver anaesthesia more effectively.- Patent Pending!Real-time spatial compounding through non-rigid registration.- Patent Pending!