About
Contact
Feel free to reach out to me at bhalla.kunal@gmail.com: I must warn you that I'm remarkably bad at replying to email.
Career
I'm a Principal Software Engineer at Facebook Meta New York working on
developer tools for data and ML engineers. You can find me around the
internet on Facebook, Instagram and Threads.
October 2019 - present: AI & Data Developer Infrastructure
July 2023 - Present: Large Models
Now helping build infrastructure and tools for large models and meta; learning how to help speed up researchers and not just engineers. Occasionally helping with herding LLaMas wherever I can be useful.
July 2020 - July 2023: ML DevX
I'm now working on tools for ML Developers; particularly to make debugging ML models faster and simpler. We started a new sub-team to tackle these problems and are building expert systems to automate workflows for debugging and investigating models.
October 2019 - July 2020: Data DevX
I helped spin up and lead a team to work on infrastructure to support Bento: our in-house Jupyter Notebook solution. We cleaned up a lot of existing technical debt and worked towards a significantly more stable and simpler set up while pushing the limits of Jupyter notebooks.
July 2016 - October 2019: Android Battery
Going back into systems, I worked on instrumenting and understanding Facebook's battery consumption – setting up systems to keep battery consumption within reasonable limits. We worked on getting these systems up and running across Facebook's family of Android apps.
We've talked publicly about this work – at Droidcon SF and Mobile@Scale, and also open sourced the core library for instrumentation: Battery Metrics.
I also spent a significant amount of time working on underlying infrastructure in Facebook for Android to make it more efficient.
July 2015 - July 2016: Android Checkins
I was curious about what user-facing product work was like after spending almost 4 years working on very different layers of infrastructure.
We worked on testing out new types of stories for checkins, where I was leading the Android engineering team.
July 2014 - July 2015: Android Maps
After working on mobile stack traces without actually understanding how mobile development worked, I was very curious about how Android worked and learned Android at Facebook.
I had a chance to work on a tiny maps client that allowed scrolling, panning, interacting with maps, drawing geodesics, etc.
We have 2 patents from this work: fast caching/rendering as well as rendering multiple sources.
2013 - July 2014: Mobile Reliability
As part of Facebook's transition to mobile, I worked on improving our tools to aggregate stack traces from iOS and Android. With this work in place we reached a much better place to tackle problems in our mobile apps.
The tools also ended up generalizing and scaling really well: what started as something PHP specific ended up supporting all our mobile apps and several backend services.
2012 - 2013: Web Reliability
I worked on tools that measured how many errors Facebook's web-endpoints were having. A lot of visualization, PHP, Javascript and a smattering of C++.
I'm most proud of a pipeline rewrite that allowed us to get information about the status of www.facebook.com in 30 seconds instead of 15 minutes.
Education
In a past life I studied Civil Engineering at IIT Delhi from 2007 — 2011, with a minor degree in Computer Science.
I also interned at Yahoo Bangalore, Peri, Foodiebay (now known as Zomato) and some other startups; apart from taking part in Google Summer of Code 2010.
Disclaimer
The opinions expressed on this site are mine and do not necessarily represent those of my employer. You won't find any confidential company information here, and while you're welcome to get in touch with me, I'm afraid I can't put you in contact with my employer.