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
Email 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

  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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
  • 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

  • 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
  • 2013 - 2017

    Dhaka, Bangladesh

    B.Sc.
    Bangladesh University of Engineering and Technology (BUET)
    Computer Science and Engineering
    • Technical Scholarship recipient

Awards

  • 2024
    Best Paper Runner-Up Award
    EuroSys 2024

    Awarded for TraceUpscaler at the 19th ACM European Conference on Computer Systems (acceptance rate ~17%)

  • 2024
    Student Grant
    EuroSys 2024
  • 2023
    Student Grant
    USENIX OSDI 2023
  • 2020
    Student Grant
    USENIX OSDI 2020
  • 2021
    Registration Grant
    ACM SIGMETRICS 2021
  • 2019
    Student Travel Grant
    ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC)
  • 2018
    Student Travel Grant
    ACM Symposium on Cloud Computing (SoCC)
  • 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