Curriculum Vitae

London, UK (open to UK-remote)

linkedin.com/in/vithungajendra - github.com/vithun - x.com/vithun

Engineering Director at Maersk, targeting VP Engineering roles

Engineering leader with 15+ years in industry. I built Maersk’s 40-person Integrated Supply Chain Engine organisation from its first hire across Maidenhead, Copenhagen and Bengaluru. It owns the real-time container visibility platform and the SaaS products on top of it, which enable $200M+ annually in revenue. I set its event-driven architecture and a ship-daily culture where weekly or fortnightly releases had been the norm, and I rolled out AI-assisted engineering (Claude Code) to every engineer ahead of wider adoption in the company. Earlier, as Platform Architect, I ran technical due diligence on 3 acquisitions; all 3 closed and are now fully integrated.

Experience

Maersk — Engineering Director (Aug 2022 – present) · Platform Architect (Apr 2021 – Aug 2022)

Maidenhead, Copenhagen, Bengaluru

Built the organisation to 40 engineers from the first hire. I personally hired and onboarded the earliest engineers and now lead through 2 senior engineering managers, 1 engineering manager and 3 lead engineers. 30+ engineers hired in total; 6 engineers promoted to lead/manager; I raised the interview bar across the platform organisation and created a career path for individual contributors.
Own the container visibility platform and its SaaS visibility and recommendation products, which enable $200M+ in revenue. The platform provides real-time location and milestone tracking of containers and is fed by a growing set of data integrations. 3000+ customers / 150k+ containers tracked per week.
Own the annual operating plan and a $5m budget, including the hiring forecast and roadmap prioritisation. I represent engineering in trade-offs with product and business leadership, and report to the VP of Engineering, with directors and senior directors as peers.
Set the architecture from the outset. I wrote the strategy document and reference architecture: an event-driven Kafka core, which broke deliberately from the business’s batch-processing norm, with domain-driven design as a founding practice. Four years and 40 engineers later, the domain boundaries and the Kafka core still stand as designed.
Moved delivery from weekly or fortnightly releases to shipping daily. I built CI/CD, observability and SRE practices into the teams from their first hires, on Kubernetes, Terraform, GitHub Actions and Prometheus/Grafana.
Run monthly operational reviews with every team on API latency, error rates and resource consumption. Scaling down under-utilised resources keeps cloud cost in check, and scaling up ahead of demand protects availability.
Gave every engineer Claude Code early, ahead of wider company adoption. I measure its effect on output with my own scripts over the GitHub API and treat the results as a signal, not a scorecard.
Before forming the visibility organisation, I led delivery of a core reporting capability that unblocked customer migrations off a legacy platform.
M&A (as Platform Architect): ran technical due diligence on 3 E-Commerce Logistics acquisitions; all 3 closed and are now integrated. I owned each technical integration path from late-stage deal work through the first post-close actions, personally carried out one acquired company’s migration to Azure, and co-created a reusable framework for assessing acquisition targets’ technology.

Expedia.com Ltd. — SDE1 → SDE2 → Senior SDE → Principal SDE (Sep 2013 – Mar 2021)

Promoted three times, the last to Principal.

Tech-led “Connected Trips”, an event-driven system on Kafka and Kubernetes that combined separately booked items into one trip. It started as a deliberately limited prototype and grew into the proper Trips domain. I also piloted proactive call-centre outreach to travellers using the same trip data.
Built an automated release-notes and deployment-events pipeline (GitHub APIs + AWS Lambda/DynamoDB) used across thousands of applications. It let operations teams link incidents to the deploys that caused them, and it was still in use when I left six years later. I ran the related chat bots and browser extensions as an inner-source project.
Helped stand up a new engineering office in Amman, Jordan. I worked hands-on with the first 10 engineers from hiring through onboarding to embedding culture and technical practices; the office later grew to 40+.
As Principal, owned the architecture and consolidation approach for the company’s fragmented CRM landscape, and led the technical capability evaluation in the RFP to select a single vendor.

British Sky Broadcasting — Software Engineer (Mar 2012 – Sep 2013)

Worked on sky.com (around 1M views a day) and its move to a responsive site, built a replacement CMS in Groovy/Grails, and introduced strict test-driven development.

Institute of Philosophy, University of London — Software Engineer (Mar 2011 – Mar 2012)

Sole developer of PhilEvents, owning everything from server procurement to production. I built it as a CMS so that sister sites such as PhilJobs could run on the same platform.

How I lead

Candour: I grow people through radical candour, with direct feedback, coaching and the hard conversations.
Role-modelling: I set the standard by what I consistently do rather than by mandate, and I build high-trust teams that own outcomes end-to-end.
Close to the technology: I review architecture and RFCs and write my own proofs-of-concept and analysis scripts, without displacing the engineers who own the systems.

Core Technology

Kafka · event-driven and domain-driven design · AWS · Azure (AKS, Functions) · Kubernetes · Terraform · GitHub Actions · Prometheus/Grafana · Datadog · Java/Spring Boot · Node.js · React · Postgres · AI-assisted engineering (Claude Code, pi)

Education

MSc, Advanced Web Engineering — University of Essex (2009 – 2010) · Awarded the RA Brooker Prize for best performance in the examination and dissertation.
BE, Information Science & Engineering — M S Ramaiah Institute of Technology (2004 – 2008)