CV
Full CV for Sultan Mahmud Sajal — Performance Engineer at NetApp, Systems Researcher, Ph.D. Penn State.
Contact Information
| Name | Sultan Mahmud Sajal |
| Professional Title | Performance Engineer & Systems Researcher |
| smsajal116@gmail.com |
Professional Summary
Performance Engineer at NetApp and Systems Researcher with a Ph.D. from Penn State. I design and study systems that run at cloud scale — from AI inference infrastructure at Meta to trace-driven evaluation tools deployed in Azure production.
Experience
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2026 - present San Jose, CA
Performance Engineer
NetApp
- Optimizing performance of AIDE (AI Data Engine), a distributed platform for ingesting, cataloging, and serving enterprise storage data for AI workloads
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2024 - 2026 Menlo Park, CA
Performance and Capacity Engineer
Meta Platforms, Inc.
- Optimized rack power budgets for multiple AI-inference hardware programs, yielding $100M/year in data-center OpEx savings and a standardized budget-optimization framework across Meta’s AI infrastructure hardware programs
- Drove cross-functional work to raise the power limit of GPUs used by recommendation services, cutting required GPU capacity by 7% with no increase in power budget ($400k/year benefit)
- Delivered power budget for flash-storage racks providing 7.3 EB of storage to support GenAI training
- Delivered power budget for flash-storage racks providing 9.9 EB of storage to support MySQL and other services
- Redesigned the Power Sufficiency Simulator pipeline, increasing input accuracy and reducing Thrift service dependencies by 77%
- Created a machine-level power-estimation methodology for power-capped machines, improving power-capping efficiency by 11% or reducing overage risk by 0.15%, depending on the scenario
- Developed a technique to estimate power at the power-device level from host-level metrics, reaching 99%+ accuracy and eliminating 0.9%-6% estimation error across power-device types
- Improved idle-host power-usage estimation accuracy by up to 31%, strengthening rack-level budget planning
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2022 - 2022 Redmond, WA
Research Intern
Cloud Operations Research (CORE), Microsoft Research
- Designed Kerveros, a novel Azure admission-control system reaching 95%+ utilization at 99.9%+ availability in production; deployed in Azure and published at OSDI 2023
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2021 - 2021 Redmond, WA
Research Intern
Gray Systems Lab (GSL), Microsoft
- Built realistic Azure HDInsight benchmarks by reconstructing Spark workloads from query traces; generated privacy-preserving synthetic datasets
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2018 - 2024 University Park, PA
Research & Teaching Assistant
Pennsylvania State University
- Research on cloud-systems evaluation methodology (publications at EuroSys 2024 and 2021)
- Teaching assistant for multiple undergraduate courses
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2017 - 2018 Dhaka, Bangladesh
Junior Software Engineer
Reve Systems
- Prototyped a machine-translation system supporting Bangla and 25 additional languages
- Built a Bangla NLP platform prototype (machine translator, spell checker, and more)
Education
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2018 - 2024 University Park, PA
Ph.D.
Pennsylvania State University
Computer Science and Engineering
- Dissertation: Improving the Fidelity of Trace-Driven Experiments in Cloud Computing Systems
- Advisors: Prof. Timothy Zhu and Prof. Bhuvan Urgaonkar
- Published at OSDI, EuroSys (×2), and ACM TOCS
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2013 - 2017 Dhaka, Bangladesh
B.Sc.
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET)
Computer Science and Engineering
- Technical Scholarship recipient
Awards
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2024 Best Paper Runner-Up Award
EuroSys 2024
Awarded for TraceUpscaler at the 19th ACM European Conference on Computer Systems (acceptance rate ~17%)
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2024 Student Grant
EuroSys 2024
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2023 Student Grant
USENIX OSDI 2023
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2020 Student Grant
USENIX OSDI 2020
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2021 Registration Grant
ACM SIGMETRICS 2021
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2019 Student Travel Grant
ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC)
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2018 Student Travel Grant
ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC)
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2013 Technical Scholarship
Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology
Skills
Specialized Areas: Distributed Systems, Systems Benchmarking, Power Budget Optimization, Performance Analysis
Languages: Python, Java, C++, Scala, R
Frameworks & Tools: Pandas, Apache Spark, Docker, Kubernetes, Git
Cloud Platforms: AWS, Azure
Web & DevOps: Nginx, Varnish, Memcached
Databases: MySQL, PostgreSQL, Presto
Scripting & Markup: Bash, LaTeX, HTML/CSS
Languages
English : Fluent
Bengali : Native speaker