Varun Dey

Hi, I am Varun. I’m a backend engineer who builds customer-first products and highly scalable distributed systems, with a focus on eliminating bottlenecks and keeping platforms reliable at scale.

Currently a Senior Software Engineer 2 at Smartsheet, on the Authentication team. Every request to Smartsheet starts with proving who you are, so I care a lot about making that path fast, boring and hard to break. Lately most of my time has been going into decoupling auth from the monolith, scaling it, speeding it up, and building new features on top.

Before Smartsheet, I spent a couple of years at Hasura, where I designed and built the CLI for DDN (Data Delivery Network). I talked to users directly to cut onboarding friction, and ended up fixing things across backend services and infra along the way. I also built a proactive alerting system so teams could catch bottlenecks before users did.

Before that, I was at Blinkit (formerly Grofers), growing from SDE-1 to Tech Lead. It was an intense stretch. We moved from next-day to 10-minute delivery, and I owned the order allocation system and built logistics infrastructure that had to stay reliable at that speed.

I started my career at NortonLifeLock (formerly Symantec), building Norton Password Manager and Safe Search for millions of users.

I enjoy watching football (Visca El Barça) and reading in my free time. Check out my readlist.

You can find me on Twitter, Github, and LinkedIn, or reach me via email. I promise I won’t bite. :)