Ajay Akilan

Hired for a job I couldn’t define

They asked what I’d do if the application went down. I said: tell people straight away, be honest about how long, be clear about what I don’t know yet, get the people who do know onto a call.

In my first week a training course told me those were the principles of the job. I hadn’t guessed them. I just knew what it feels like to be the person waiting for an answer, and I knew what a room does when nobody says anything.

I didn’t know the tooling. I knew the room.

What I actually do

Zoom’s chat runs on a set of services I look after — the APIs behind it, the real-time messaging layer, and the public edge it all arrives through. Fifteen regions, three clouds, and my name on it when it moves.

Five years on one system turns out to be worth something. You learn where it gives and where it doesn’t, which changes are quiet and which ones will find you out. Most of the job is knowing which is which before you press anything.

Six things I’ve done to it

Moved it onto Kubernetes. Replaced its public edge while it was still serving traffic. Put it in two regions at once, so losing one stopped being an event. Cut a seven-hour release to fifty-two minutes. Built the view of what’s actually happening. Took between 29 and 77 percent off what it costs to run.

→ Each one, drawn out

The other room

I write, direct, act, and draw. I plan the trips — for my team, for my family, for friends who’ve long since stopped pretending they’ll organise anything themselves. People ask me things because it’s easy to ask me things.

None of it is separate from the job. Production is production: you make the best thing you can, you learn whatever you’re missing to close the gap, you put it in front of people, and you stay in the room while it runs.