$ whoami: Sunny Dalal
Staff Software Engineer @ twenty.io
I build backend platforms and infrastructure — usually as the core of the product itself, powering what customers actually use. Currently at Twenty, working in defense tech.
$ cat about.md
About
Currently a Staff Software Engineer at Twenty, a defense tech startup. Before that, I spent years inside large engineering orgs — Capital One and MicroStrategy — building the backend platforms and infrastructure at the core of the product, the systems customers were actually running on.
I gravitate toward problems at the infrastructure layer: reliable APIs, resilient systems, the stuff that has to just work because it's what the product is actually built on.
$ git log --stat experience/
Experience
Staff Software Engineer
- Lead architecture and design decisions in building AI-enabled cyber-warfare systems for the U.S. military and Intelligence Community, contributing to industrial-scale cyber capabilities engineered for reliability under real-world conditions.
- Engineering systems built around recursive graph expansion — modeling and traversing large, interconnected data structures to support operations across a large and evolving threat landscape.
- Support platform and infrastructure engineering efforts across the broader engineering org, joining during the company's Series A and continuing through its Series B-1 raise at a $1.2B valuation.
Senior Software Engineer
- Built a distributed backend platform for enterprise customer-banking services, enabling automated API validation and compliance checks across dozens of microservices and multiple engineering teams.
- Designed Python-based developer tooling to scaffold test harnesses and publish results into Jira X-Ray and GitHub checks, cutting manual validation effort by ~70% across 5,000+ component tests.
- Integrated platform services into CI/CD and local dev workflows, bringing full API validation suites under 5 minutes and lifting test coverage on customer-facing services by ~40%.
- Ran weekly cross-team technical reviews with 5–10 product and platform teams, maintaining 100% SLA compliance while unblocking downstream engineering work.
Senior Software Engineer
Oct 2021 – Oct 2024
Software Engineer
Feb 2019 – Oct 2021
- Engineered REST APIs in Java (Spring MVC) and PostgreSQL to provision AWS EC2–based customer environments, supporting automated deployments across hundreds of instances.
- Automated cloud provisioning with Kubernetes, Terraform, Lambda, Step Functions, and SQS, cutting manual operational effort and accelerating environment setup.
- Led architecture and prototyping for platform enhancements that improved reliability and cut AWS/Azure infrastructure costs by ~15% while supporting continued customer growth.
Software Engineering Intern — Genomics Automation
- Developed high-performance Bash pipelines to annotate and cluster large-scale genomic datasets, significantly improving processing throughput over prior workflows.
- Performed bioinformatics analysis on annotated sequences to identify gene vulnerabilities, contributing to downstream experimental design and agricultural research initiatives.
- Automated genomic similarity searches using BLAST-based pipelines, increasing accuracy and consistency of sequence comparison across thousands of samples.
Amazon Web Services
Software Engineering Intern — AWS Marketplace
- Designed and implemented a scalable internal tool for business development teams, streamlining workflows and reducing manual effort by ~75%.
- Built backend services and APIs using AWS-native technologies to support real-time data updates and secure data manipulation while meeting Amazon production and security standards.
- Delivered production features in collaboration with senior engineers, gaining hands-on experience with large-scale internal frameworks and cloud-native service architectures.
$ cat contact.md