Kamran Tirdad

Hands-On Platform Engineering Leader | Infrastructure, Reliability & AI Systems
Greater Seattle Areaktirdad@gmail.com+1 206-535-9054linkedin.com/in/kamran-tirdad-58b18520

Profile

Hands-on engineering leader and founder with 15+ years building cloud/platform infrastructure, developer tooling, AI products, and consumer-scale systems. Former Head of Application Infrastructure at Snap, leading a 37-person org across runtime infrastructure, service mesh/compute, CI/CD, config, observability, and cloud insights. Early Snap engineer who helped scale from startup to global production workloads, led monolith-to-SOA/service-mesh evolution, and drove $100M+ annual infrastructure savings. Strong fit for lean platform teams needing an EM who stays technical: architecture, code review, production debugging, hiring, and direct leadership communication.

OPENROUTER FIT

  • Platform depth: runtime infra, service mesh, observability, CI/CD, config, cloud cost, reliability, capacity.
  • AI-native builder: founder building LLM/generative-AI products; strong model/provider/cost trade-off intuition.

Professional Experience

Snap Inc. | Head of Application Infrastructure / Senior Engineering Manager
2014 - Nov 2023
  • Joined Snap when it was a 32 person company and started Application Infrastructure team and grew it to 37 people org across 5 teams of Mesh Compute/CI-CD, Runtime Infrastructure, config management, Observability, and Cloud Insights.
  • Owned technical direction, roadmaps, reliability, capacity, and cost for platform systems supporting Snap production workloads and millions of users.
  • Drove $100M+ in annual infrastructure cost savings through cloud insights, measurement, architectural levers, and contract/vendor strategy; managed $10M+ annual commitments.
  • Led transition from monolithic architecture to service-oriented architecture using service mesh and platform-agnostic compute, improving deployment velocity, resiliency, and operability.
  • Built, hired, mentored, and retained high-caliber teams of ICs, managers, and TPMs while maintaining pragmatic process and high ownership.
  • Partnered directly with engineering/infrastructure leadership and Google Cloud Mission Critical Services on platform priorities, reliability goals, incident response, and production debugging.
Amazon / AWS | Software Development Engineer
2011 - 2014
  • Built reliable, cost-efficient backend frameworks for AWS Glacier billing and storage workflows; developed scalable services balancing reliability, cost, and operational simplicity.
    Contributed to cold-storage system inventions/patents.
  • Created a Kindle Fire browser trending algorithm that reduced compute cost by ~90% and doubled readership.

RECENT ENTREPRENEURIAL PROJECTS

Vinchy.app - AI apparel shopping assistant with the largest database of hand-measured garments and a fit algorithm leveraging LLM reasoning.
FileToWeb.com - a public benefit initiative with the goal of annihilating PDF and improving accessibility on the web. Developed a novel algorithm to convert PDF To HTML, developed multiple agent harnesses for document editing customized for lite and live real-time duplex models with advanced visual artifact generation.

Skills

Leadership:
Engineering management, hiring, architecture review, incident leadership, capacity planning, executive communication.
Infrastructure:
Distributed systems, service mesh, runtime infrastructure, CI/CD, observability, SRE/reliability, cloud cost optimization, multi-cloud.

Education & Research

University of Waterloo - M.S. Computer Science; B.S. Computer Science
Iran University of Science & Technology - B.S. Computer Engineering
Best Student Paper Award, SPIRE: "COCA Filters: Co-occurrence Aware Bloom Filters."