Meet the Chronosphere team: Shreyas Srivatsan, Member of Technical Staff

We are growing an amazing team, and we like to shine a light on Chronospherians at every opportunity. In today’s “Meet the Chronosphere Team” profile, we talk to Shreyas Srivatsan, who is a member of Chronosphere’s technical staff.

Shreyas is a part of Chronosphere’s West Coast team and is based in Seattle, where we have a growing hub of Chronospherians. He is part of Chronosphere’s remote-first workforce, which means every employee has the freedom and flexibility to work from the place where they will be happiest and most productive. (You can read more about Chronosphere’s approach to a near in-person, remote-first work experience here.)

Continue on to learn some fun facts about this key member of our engineering team:

What do you do at Chronosphere?

I have worked on a bunch of things for the almost two years I’ve been here. The primary focus really has been the ingestion pipeline – getting metrics from customer environments into Chronosphere. For the past six or so months, I’ve led a team called Rapid Response. The goal of the team is to make sure that the product team can continue building the product based on longer-term roadmaps, with Rapid Response coming in and doing the sizable feature work that’s off the roadmap.

What were some of the reasons you decided to come to Chronosphere?

It was a couple of different things. I worked on the observability team at Uber, so Chronosphere’s space obviously interested me – I spent a lot of my time working on alerting, dashboarding, and different metrics use cases. The second aspect, which really tipped it for me, was getting to work with some of my ex-colleagues at Uber again – like the co-founders Martin and Rob, and others like Ben, Jerome, and Matt. All these folks were some of the most fun people I’ve worked with – they are enjoyable and really helpful people who are always looking after you.

What did you do before coming to Chronosphere?

I started off my career spending almost six years at Microsoft working on low-level kernel virtualization. I was on the Windows kernel team working on the hypervisor virtualization kernel, which was a lot of fun. I thought I’d be doing that forever, but we decided to move to New York. I decided to give working at a bank a shot and so I spent about a year and a half working at Goldman Sachs. While the work was fun, I missed working in the tech world, which led me to Uber. I started working on observability there.

What is the most interesting technical challenge Chronosphere is solving?

Not having an environment that is at the same scale as our customers is one of the daily challenges. We have some really large customers, which we want to build features for, but our own largest environments are probably one-fifth the size of theirs. Sometimes when working on a new feature, it is hard to figure out how it would work at the scale the customer operates on.

Also, building a product that deals with metrics at scale has been another challenge: How do you manage thousands, or tens of thousands, of alerts? How do you show the most important information to people from this huge amount of data that we actually can store in M3?

What are you working on right now that you’re excited about?

It has been a lot of fun solving customers’ metrics ingestion problems. A large part of what the Rapid Response team has been doing is working with customers during their pilot phases to understand how their current metric systems are set up and how they would transfer to Chronosphere. We’re making sure that they work with us.

It’s a joy to see when we build a new feature in the ingestion pipeline – what we call the collector – and a customer says, “That’s awesome – now we can move forward and start using the product.”

What’s a fun fact about you that nobody would guess?

Pre-pandemic, my wife and I would travel a lot. In the past five or six years, we’ve been to like 35 or 40 different countries. Every month or so we would be out and about somewhere.

What’s one of your favorite places you’ve visited?

One of my favorite places was Tanzania and the Serengeti. The most surprising place that we really loved was Croatia and Bosnia … we really didn’t know what to expect when we went there and it was amazing. I think a third place I’d include was the last trip we took before the pandemic – spending a week in Egypt.

What (non-Chronosphere) stickers are on your laptop?

I’m not really a sticker person. I just like the clean look of the MacBook, which is the apple showing up on the other side.

If you were an animal, what would you be?

I want to say, zebra. When we went to Tanzania, one of the first animal encounters we saw was two lions and a zebra standing across from each other. The zebra has this massive, wide vision and it was staring at the lions … any movement the lion made, the zebra was able to make it faster. Then when we got to the Serengeti, we saw many more encounters with the lions … they seemed really smart.

Who is someone you have considered a role model and how have they helped guide you in your life or career?

It has changed over time. Like most people, as kids my parents were role models. After that, it became sports people, like Roger Federer … with him, there’s this real quality of play and being able to do that in an artistic fashion. If I played tennis, I would like to emulate Roger Federer.

In my career, it was one of my early managers at Microsoft who helped define how I should work and think. He had a really strong breadth and depth of technical knowledge. He helped inculcate that you have to keep reading things, keep experimenting … he wouldn’t give you an answer directly but would make you think, and that’s really helped me grow.

What’s a quote you reflect on, you mention to people a lot, or that motivates you?

It’s one of Chronosphere’s values, “Never done learning.” What helps me grow, and what I think helps everyone grow, is to keep learning, keep doing new things. That’s how we grow as people, that’s how we help grow the company.

Listen in to hear the full conversation: