Hi, I'm Ashish Muralidharan

I help engineering teams make backend systems faster, safer, and easier to scale.

Senior Software Engineer & Tech Lead · 10+ years · Java, Spring Boot, Node.js · System design, performance & security

I work best with engineering organizations building high-scale APIs, event-driven systems, privacy-sensitive AI pipelines, and third-party integrations.

View case studiesRésuméPDF · Updated Oct 2026Connect on LinkedIn
Portrait of Ashish Muralidharan

Results at a glance

Selected Case Studies

The problem, my role, how I diagnosed it, what I built, and what changed.

How I Lead

Hands-on technical leadership: I stay close to the code, and measure leadership by what the team can do without me.

engineers on the team I lead
13
engineers mentored, early-career to senior
5–6
interviews for full-stack roles
~40
hosting biweekly Technical Thursdays
Since 2022

Hands-on architecture · 60% of my time

Better architecture decisions and faster resolution of hard problems.

Example: Designed the shared authentication and proxy platform that delivered 21 integrations in 5 months and was adopted by 5 product teams.

Strategy & delivery · 30% of my time

Clearer roadmaps, reliable estimates, and cross-team alignment.

Example: Coordinated across squads with a partner product team to deliver core features that unblocked onboarding for major enterprise customers.

Mentorship & team growth · 10% of my time

Stronger ownership, better reviews, and a team that grows its own capability.

Example: During the database initiative, ran sessions on MySQL internals so the team could find and fix slow queries themselves.

Practices I've introduced

  • Led adoption of Blue-Green deployments across teams as Release Owner, for zero-downtime releases.
  • Set standards for AI-assisted development that cut end-to-end feature delivery time by 70% with a near-zero defect rate.
  • Security Champion Plus: threat modeling, data-classification standards, and mentoring engineers on secure design.
  • Created and host Technical Thursdays, a biweekly forum on performance, async messaging, and Node.js architecture.
  • Recognized as Q3 Top Performer for org-wide scalability, monitoring, pod scaling, and database optimization work.

Professional Experience

10+ years across Zoom, Freshworks, and Zoho.

June 2022 - Present (4+ years)

Senior Software Engineer

Zoom•Remote
  • ▸Tech lead for a team of 13 engineers, owning architecture decisions and technical strategy.
  • ▸Leading the architectural decoupling that replaces a third-party vendor tool with an in-house product. Architected its privacy-first AI pipeline with dynamic PII redaction and LLM routing across tiered models to optimize API cost.
  • ▸Built a high-performance LLM execution layer with Server-Sent Events for real-time token streaming and semantic caching to cut redundant API calls, plus observability dashboards for guardrails, token usage, and model telemetry.
  • ▸Coordinated across squads with a partner product team to build core features that unblocked onboarding for major enterprise customers.
  • ▸Designed a hot-warm-cold data-archival strategy and redesigned core tables, resolving 15+ complex queries with the team and taking database CPU from a constant 70–80% to 25–30%, enabling a smaller, cheaper instance.
Nov 2020 - May 2022 (1 year 7 months)

Fullstack Senior Software Developer

Freshworks•Chennai
  • ▸Squad Lead and Scrum Master, driving technical roadmaps and working directly with Product Management to architect highly scalable web solutions in Ruby on Rails and EmberJS.
  • ▸Analyzed defect trends to triage and debug support requests, finding systemic bottlenecks and fixing the affected areas to permanently reduce support-ticket volume.
  • ▸Mentored junior engineers through pair programming and code reviews, upheld clean-code and TDD standards, and managed task delegation.
June 2018 - Oct 2020 (2 years 5 months)

Fullstack Software Developer

Freshworks•Chennai
  • ▸Led the backend implementation of core CRM functionality in Freshsales, including highly available email integration features.
  • ▸Revamped and optimized legacy import/migration tools, significantly improving data-ingestion performance.
  • ▸Played a key role in the architectural integration of Segment into the Freshsales ecosystem, improving cross-platform data insights.
May 2016 - May 2018 (2 years)

Member Technical Staff

Zoho Corporation•Chennai
  • ▸Built scalable REST APIs integrating accounting, invoicing, and taxation modules.
  • ▸Played a substantial backend role in building and launching Zoho's GST returns-filing platform for enterprises.
  • ▸Optimized complex MySQL queries to reduce latency, and built integrations between Zoho Books and AvaTax.

Technical Skills

Backend
  • Java
  • Spring Boot
  • Node.js
  • TypeScript
  • Ruby on Rails
  • Python
  • C++
Architecture
  • Distributed systems
  • Microservices
  • Monolith-to-microservices decoupling
  • Event-driven systems (Kafka)
  • RESTful API design
  • Blue-Green deployments
  • CI/CD
Data & performance
  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
  • Elasticsearch
  • Query & index optimization
  • Data archival strategies
  • ZFS
Security
  • Threat modeling
  • Data classification
  • PII redaction
  • OAuth 2.0
  • PKCE
AI & LLM pipelines
  • LLM routing
  • Semantic caching
  • SSE streaming
  • AI observability
Frontend
  • Next.js
  • React
  • EmberJS
  • HTML
  • CSS

Writing

Articles on security, engineering culture, and clean code

Why Your Team Needs a Security Champion (And Why It Should Be You)

Medium•April 2026

Why security has to shift left into design and everyday development, and how a Security Champion makes it a shared team responsibility instead of a final gate.

Navigating the Challenges and Milestones as the First Member in Zoom Video Communications — India R&D Team for Contact Center

Medium•January 2024

The challenges and milestones of joining as the first member of Zoom’s India R&D team for Contact Center, after four years at Freshworks.

Summary of Clean Code by Robert C. Martin (3-part series)

Medium•March 2021

A practical, chapter-by-chapter summary of Clean Code, covering the overview, meaningful names, and writing small, single-purpose functions.

View All Articles

About Me

I'm a Senior Software Engineer and Tech Lead at Zoom, where I lead a team of 13 engineers. Across 10+ years of professional experience at Zoom, Freshworks, and Zoho, I've worked on backend platforms, third-party integrations, data pipelines and, more recently, privacy-first AI systems.

I like problems where performance, security, and scale meet, and I care just as much about the team as the system. Good engineering leadership, to me, means the team can make strong decisions without waiting for me.

Outside of day-to-day delivery, I write about engineering, host a biweekly knowledge-sharing forum, and mentor engineers.

Certifications & Education

Certifications

  • Security Champion Plus

    Internal Security Champions program · 2024

  • Certificate of Security Achievement: Green Belt for JavaScript

    Security Journey · Oct 2024

  • Advanced Microservices: Tactical Forking

    LinkedIn Learning · Oct 2023

  • Microservices and Software Architecture

    LinkedIn Learning · 2023

Education

Bachelor of Technology, Computer Science & Engineering

College of Engineering Chengannur (APJ Abdul Kalam Technological University) · 2012–2016

Chairman of the IEEE Computer Society student chapter: organized technical events and workshops for the student community.

Get In Touch

Interested in backend or platform engineering, technical leadership, or system-design work? Send me a short note with the context, the problem, and what you're looking for.

Open to Staff/Principal Engineer, Tech Lead, and Architect roles: international, remote, Bengaluru, or relocation.

Contact Info

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