Anuj Varma

About Anuj Varma

Staff Engineer on the Developer Experience team at Thumbtack, leading the AI…

Experience

1. Staff Software Engineer

   Thumbtack

   Oct 2022 — Present · Seattle, WA, US

   Promoted to Staff Engineer as SRE Tech Lead owning Thumbtack\'s AWS and GCP infrastructure, then transitioned to the Developer Experience team to lead AI-driven developer productivity- Led zero-downtime migration from self-hosted EC2 PostgreSQL to Aurora using bidirectional logical replication via AWS DMS. Updated PostgreSQL client libraries across PHP, Golang, Python, and Scala services- Migrated all data pipelines to Aurora without downtime by orchestrating Aurora FastClone creation through Airflow, ensuring zero load on production databases during migration- Built Thumbtack\'s real-time streaming infrastructure: Kafka Connect on self-managed ECS capturing CDC events via WAL from Aurora, with kafka-connect-bigquery writing events to BigQuery in real time- Architected service mesh using Envoy, enabling engineers to spin up network-isolated instances of their microservices in dev/staging without running the full 40+ service stack. Extended this with Aurora FastClones for per-engineer database isolation- Leading Thumbtack\'s AI transformation of the SDLC: introduced 6 agentic coding tools (GitHub Copilot Agents, Roo Code, Claude Code, OpenCode, Augment, Codex) achieving 96%+ developer adoption in the first rollout- Built a cross-tool shim layer that translates engineering best practices (skills and scripts) once and applies them across all agentic tools. Built an AI Slack bot for cross-codebase Q&A, CR creation, and code reviews- Evangelizing AI-driven development and building an internal course on building AI systems at Thumbtack.