Sharaf Ahmad

Accomplished engineering leader with 2 decades of experience in areas of Software Project Management, Software Test Management, Project Delivery, Process and People Management.

Spearheaded end-to-end responsibilities of building large scale enterprise grade products by demonstrating engineering and operational excellence, excellent collaboration with stakeholders and building high performing teams.

Practiced values such as incessant learning, continuous improvement, improving efficiency and quality, delivering business outcomes, embracing change, and enhancing customer experience.

Delivered projects in areas of Enterprise Storage/Systems management, VMWare virtualization management and Web Services.

Passionate about building great teams and products and provided hands-on leadership by blending management and technical expertise.

Proven experience in building and scaling the engineering team from the ground up, working with globally distributed teams, delivering 1.0 products, and driving product adoption. Successfully transitioning projects from different global sites.

Enjoyed stakeholder partnership with Product Management,, Technical Marketing, User experience, IT, Customer support in building the roadmap, prioritizing the high-impact business use cases and most importantly improving customer experience.

Professional Achievements

• Driving product roadmap delivery, with end-to-end ownership of 4 manageability products leading to 12+ releases, over the last 5-6 years. This resulted in 25K ONTAP controllers attach rate
• Built a high-performing new 12-member team in a new domain (virtualization provisioning), taking end-to-end responsibility for successfully delivering 6 releases in just 2 years for a product with hundreds of customers, requiring continuous collaboration with VMWare.
• Reduced customer escalations from around 50 to low single digits.
• Improved security satisfaction score from 80% to 97%
• Successfully drove development and integration of 1.0 Provisioning product into manageability suite.
• Driving various scalability improvements initiatives which helped in increased customer adoption
• Drove significant improvements in improving install experience, reduction of product regression issues, improving build stability by sharing, leveraging, and implementing engineering best practices, tools, and processes across various geo teams
• Implemented "automation first" approach, resulting in an increase in regression automation (40% to 80%), code coverage (40% to 70%), and a 40% reduction in backend cycles (6 weeks to 4 weeks).

NetApp, Bangalore | Engineering Manager-Level 3 | Jun 2015 – April 2023

• Driving product roadmap delivery, with complete accountability and end to end QA ownership of 4 manageability products leading to 12+ releases, over the last 5-6 years by partnering with Product, Product Management, Technical Marketing, UX design, customer support, and operations teams, prioritizing the high-impact business use cases. This resulted in 25K ONTAP controllers attach rate
• Built a high-performing new 12-member team in a new domain (virtualization provisioning), taking responsibility for successfully delivering 6 releases in just 2 years for a product with hundreds of customers, requiring continuous collaboration with VMWare.
• Restored customer confidence and trust by providing 6 critical and complex performance fixes in couple of months
• Reduced customer escalations by implementing effective measures, resulting in a significant drop in customer issues from around 50 to low single digits.
• Improved security satisfaction score from 80% to 97% by proactively collaborating with security team and providing all required fixes and features according to schedule. 
• Proactively worked with VMWare to resolve a customer escalation, resulting in effort savings of 3-man months for a patch release
• Drove significant test improvements in improving install experience, reduction of product regression issues, improving build stability by sharing, leveraging, and implementing engineering best practices, tools, and processes across teams in Bangalore and North Carolina
• Worked as a single QA manager and collaborated with 3 Dev Managers across geos, to deliver the integration of 1.0 Provisioning product into software manageability suite. Was also accountable for overall quality of the software manageability suite.
• Drove various scalability improvements initiatives. Increasing scale to 18k vVols from 8k vVols in VMWare environment. Increasing scale of storage volumes provisioned in a data center through manageability suite to thousands to meet SLO regarding latency and throughput. 
• Led the implementation of an "automation first" approach, resulting in an increase in regression automation (40% to 80%), code coverage (40% to 70%), and a 40% reduction in backend cycles (6 weeks to 4 weeks).
• Built a high-performing QA team from scratch and successfully transitioned a workflow automation project from Israel to Bangalore, expanding the customer base from 10 to more than 100.
• Significantly reduced manual regression time (from 5 weeks to 1 week) by investing in UI automation.
• Improved the supportability experience by conducting root cause analysis of support cases and incorporating learnings into the development cycle.
• Recruited, mentored, and coached engineers to ensure a high-performing team and successful delivery of projects.

NetApp, Bangalore | Engineering Manager-Level 2 | Jan 2012 – Jun 2015

• As a Release QA Manager, collaborated with teams across different geographies to coordinate the QA effort.
• Innovated the implementation of Install/Upgrade tests, Build Acceptance, and Sanity tests.
• Reduced manual build sanity time from 4 days to 8 hours by implementing automation processes and automation tool consolidation. 
• Ensured project delivery by working with and collaborating with outsourced employees.

• Led as Release QA Lead, collaborating with sub teams in Bangalore and the US to ensure successful product releases.
• Served as QA Lead for multiple 1.0 products, specializing in provisioning and performance management.
• Innovated test setup strategies to replicate customer environments, resulting in improved efficiency and accuracy.
• Led Beta testing activities and proactively resolved reported issues, resulting in increased customer adoption.
• Organized cross-functional defect storming sessions to improve product quality.

• Recognized as tester in finding maximum number of quality issues in feature under test
• Leading testing activities for multiple releases of “Provisioning Manager”, “Performance Advisor”
• Interaction with customers for Beta Testing
• Automating test cases

Dell | PG QA Engineer | Dec 2003 - Aug 2005

Hughes Software | Software Engineer | July 2001 - Nov 2003

BTech in Electronics Engineering ( 2001 ) CGPA = 9.7