Our Meet the Hiring Manager series allows you to get to know the people who grow teams at VMware. You’ll learn about our hiring managers’ career paths and what they look for in candidates during the interview process. This week we’d like you to meet Amit Wadhwani.
VMware Careers: Tell us about your career journey to date?
Amit Wadhwani: After graduating from college in Chicago, I took on my first job at IBM in Minnesota. I was on the J9 JVM (J9 Virtual Machine) team where I helped port the Sun JVM onto IBM mainframes. I traded the cold winters of Minnesota for the rainy skies of Seattle in my move to Microsoft where I worked on the Windows Live and Mail team. My last team at Microsoft was the Outlook sync team where I worked on a framework that allowed the outlook app to source data for the contacts and calendar apps. Continuing the pattern of improving weather systems, I moved down to sunny California for my first role at a startup Coursera. After years of indoctrination at a big company, it was a memorable experience functioning in a less structured environment.
At Coursera, I led an initiative to Sync enrollment data via APIs and Kafka between an external system the universities and Coursera. I joined the VMware Tanzu Observability team in January of 2020, shortly before COVID-19, which allowed me some time to enjoy their and now our lovely campus. At VMware, I’m currently building an index-free logging system to round out and complement our Observability offering which already has metrics and distributed traces. I joined VMware because it was somewhere between a start-up and a big company with opportunities to architect a distributed system that deals with millions of points per second at scale.
VMware Careers: How is VMware different from any other tech company you have worked for?
Amit Wadhwani: VMware has a healthy performance culture that encourages people to build good products rather than narrowly focus on short-term wins around the performance cycle. Additionally, VMware rewards you for a hard day’s work by having company-wide days off and unlimited Paid Time Off (PTO) – this helps you balance work and life.
VMware Careers: What has been the biggest lesson you have learned as you moved upwards in your career?
Amit Wadhwani: Engineering is easy, people are hard. While it’s crucial to have good engineering fundamentals, communication and relationships play a much bigger role as you move upwards in your career.
VMware Careers: Your team is hiring. Can you tell us more about your organization’s charter?
Amit Wadhwani: The Tanzu Observability team’s charter is to deliver a world-class observability platform to provide a window into the health of every app on any cloud for everyone and to run software with unified telemetry and rapid insights. Additionally, as VMware Tanzu paves the earth with Kubernetes, we endeavor to be the best-in-class Observability offering for this space.
VMware Careers: If someone reading this is coming to interview with you tomorrow for a role on your team, what interview tips would you give them?
Amit Wadhwani: We look for the ability to learn and work hard in particular. Said another way, attitude, and aptitude trump experience. My advice would have to be that while solving the problem is important, what is even more important is how you arrived at that solution and what it was like to work with you on a problem.
Could you see yourself working for a manager like Amit? Click here to browse open roles with VMware!
Security Software Engineer – Tanzu Observability
Staff Foundation DB Engineer – Tanzu Observability
Tech Lead Staff Engineer (Backend), Tanzu Observability
Engineering Manager, Tanzu Observability
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