Distributed Storage and Cloud Computing
Cornell University — ACERT and Signal Science LabAn invited seminar on how distributed storage systems balance durability, availability, performance and cost.
Watch seminar ↗Engineering leader · Author · Speaker
Arjun Mullick
I am an engineering leader, author and speaker with more than fifteen years of experience building and leading large-scale systems across digital commerce, search, recommendations, experimentation and data infrastructure.
Today, my work focuses on advertising measurement and optimization—helping systems make better decisions from fragmented signals while adapting to changing privacy expectations. I continue to explore how personalization, experimentation, privacy by design and reliable distributed systems can create experiences that people and businesses trust.
What I Work On
Current focus and continuing interests
Ideas I return to in my work—where data, customer behavior and dependable systems meet.
- 01
Ads technology
Building the systems behind relevant, measurable advertising while balancing performance, privacy and long-term customer trust.
- 02
Attribution & measurement
Connecting fragmented interactions to meaningful outcomes without reducing a complex customer journey to one convenient signal.
- 03
Data platforms
Creating dependable foundations that keep high-volume signals fresh, usable and understandable across products and teams.
- 04
Experimentation at scale
Using controlled experiments to separate durable product improvements from noise and make better decisions with evidence.
- 05
Personalization & recommendations
Helping experiences adapt as customer interests, catalogs and context change—without sacrificing speed or reliability.
- 06
Privacy-aware systems
Making privacy, consent and responsible data use part of the architecture rather than a process added after the system is built.
Featured Writing & Research
Writing on systems, measurement and trust
Articles and research on privacy, advertising measurement, enterprise AI, recommendations, experimentation, resilient infrastructure and applied mathematical modeling.
Beyond Compliance: Designing Systems That Earn Customer Trust
Why privacy and customer trust must be enforced across distributed systems, data flows, caches and AI workflows—not treated only as a compliance checklist.
Read on CSO Online ↗What Search and Recommendation Systems Taught Me About Enterprise AI
Lessons from large-scale search and personalization on retrieval, data freshness, experimentation, feedback loops, privacy and operating trustworthy enterprise AI.
Read on VKTR ↗Ransomware-Resilient Storage: The New Frontline Defense in a High-Stakes Cyber Battle
Why recovery architecture, immutability and storage-layer defenses have become central to modern cybersecurity and resilient infrastructure.
Read on InfoQ ↗Nonlinear Dynamics of Bimodality in Vehicular Traffic
A mathematical study of why traffic-flow distributions can separate into two distinct modes, identifying the symmetry-breaking and bifurcation conditions behind transitions between bimodal and unimodal behavior.
Read on Journal of Physics: Conference Series ↗Dynamics of Bimodality in Vehicular Traffic Flows
The open-access precursor to the journal paper develops a traffic-flow model that connects bimodal behavior with fixed points, homoclinic trajectories, symmetry breaking and bifurcation.
Read on arXiv ↗Scaling and Monetizing Amazon Through Experimentation
A practitioner’s look at how disciplined experimentation shapes product decisions and durable customer experiences.
Read on DEV Community ↗AI/ML-Based Storage Optimization
A practical approach to predicting cloud storage cost and recommending configurations from workload behavior.
Read on DZone ↗Designing for Sustainability: The Rise of Green Software
How software architecture, infrastructure choices and operational discipline influence energy use and sustainability.
Read on DZone ↗Benchmarking Storage Performance with Python
A hands-on method for examining latency and throughput instead of relying on generic cloud-performance assumptions.
Read on DZone ↗Automating Storage Tiering and Lifecycle Policies in AWS S3
Using Python and Boto3 to turn storage-management policy into repeatable automation.
Read on DZone ↗Securely Accessing and Managing AWS S3
Practical patterns for access control, secure operations and responsible management of object storage.
Read on DEV Community ↗Monitoring and Analyzing Cloud Storage Costs
A guide to making storage cost visible enough to support engineering tradeoffs rather than retrospective surprises.
Read on DEV Community ↗Featured Talks
Explaining systems through the decisions behind them
My talks focus on durable engineering ideas: how systems fail, how evidence improves decisions and how practitioners can reason about scale without losing sight of the customer.
Making Applied AI More Accessible
Empower Hacks 3.0A practical workshop on running development tools and experimenting with AI locally, without assuming expensive infrastructure.
Watch opening session ↗Distributed Cloud Storage
NovaSpark Pitch CompetitionA session on the engineering choices behind reliable cloud storage and the tradeoffs between performance, resilience and cost.
AI Vector Databases in Practice
Tech Innovation for Good HackathonAn introduction to vector search, retrieval and the role of data infrastructure in useful AI applications.
Speaking Topics
Talks and workshops in development
These topics bring together lessons from advertising measurement, recommendations, experimentation, distributed platforms and engineering leadership.
Why Last-Click Attribution Is Failing Modern Advertising
A practical explanation of fragmented customer journeys and the limits of assigning all value to the final observable interaction.
Building Privacy-First Measurement Systems
How engineering teams can preserve decision quality while direct observation becomes more constrained.
The Future of Advertising Measurement
What changing privacy expectations, formats and customer behavior mean for the next generation of measurement platforms.
Clicks, Views, Impressions and Engagement
How interaction types represent different forms of attention—and why careful interpretation matters.
Engineering Recommendation Systems at Scale
The system around the model: fresh data, serving reliability, exploration, feedback loops and product judgment.
Designing Reliable Distributed Systems
A grounded discussion of failure modes, availability, latency and operational simplicity.
Experimentation That Improves Decisions
Why running more tests is not the same as learning faster, and how teams can build better experimentation habits.
Engineering Leadership in Large Organizations
Lessons on clarity, technical judgment, team design and sustaining ownership across organizational boundaries.
Apex Perspective — Coming Soon
A forthcoming conversation about engineering leadership, building reliable systems at scale and lessons from leading teams through complex technical change.
More talks and workshop material coming soon.
Engineering Journey
Measuring advertising in a changing digital environment
My current work sits where advertising interactions, customer actions and privacy constraints meet. I lead engineering teams working on attribution, experimentation and measurement systems that must process signals at global scale while remaining useful to advertisers and understandable to product teams.
Making digital commerce dependable
I led teams responsible for the foundations behind digital orders, subscriptions, event messaging and privacy-aware commerce. The central engineering problem was reliability: keeping customer transactions correct and available while products, markets and traffic patterns continued to expand.
From discovery to real-time personalization
I worked across shopping, search, customer acquisition and personalized experiences. This chapter shaped how I think about recommendation systems: model quality matters, but freshness, low-latency serving, experimentation and the surrounding customer experience determine whether a system is genuinely useful.
Building the digital storefront
I helped build commerce and platform capabilities for digital content across websites and devices. Working close to customer-facing systems taught me to connect infrastructure decisions with accessibility, performance and the small interactions that determine whether a purchase experience feels dependable.
Learning to connect software with behavior
I began my career building enterprise software that combined social interaction, digital coaching and rules-based experiences. It established a lasting interest in how systems influence customer behavior—and why technical correctness alone is never the complete product.
Automating error handling for web applications
During an apprenticeship in New Delhi, I worked on automating error handling for a web application. It was an early lesson in treating failure behavior as part of the product rather than an afterthought.
Exploring semantic networks and language models
At the Homi Bhabha Centre for Science Education in Mumbai, I worked with semantic networks, language models, persistent-object protocols and databases for Common Lisp—an early introduction to representing knowledge in software.
Building GPS and transceiver tracking systems
At the Aerial Delivery Research and Development Establishment in Agra, I contributed to GPS and transceiver-based tracking systems, connecting software with real-world communication and positioning constraints.
Learning how communication infrastructure operates
My first technical internship focused on the infrastructure and operational productivity of Remote Line Unit servers. It gave me an early view of the systems that keep large communication networks running.
Contributing to engineering education and student communities
Alongside my undergraduate studies, I served as General Secretary of the Computer Society of India student forum, participated in the SPEED Global Student Forum and supported IUCEE engineering-education programs. These experiences introduced me to community building, technical exchange and leadership through service.
Professional Service
Contributing beyond day-to-day engineering work
Reviewing, judging, mentoring and sharing technical material are ways to strengthen the professional communities that helped shape my own career.
IEEE Senior Member
Participation in a global professional community advancing computing, engineering practice and technical knowledge.
Technical Judge
Evaluating professional hackathon projects across AI, software, distributed systems and technology for social impact.
Mentoring
Offering free coaching to peers, engineers and industry leaders preparing for engineering and leadership interviews.
Community Resources
Maintaining writing and coding-interview resources intended to make practical engineering knowledge easier to access.
Technical Review & Peer Evaluation
Evaluating technical work in development
I contribute to the broader engineering community through technical manuscript review and conference peer review. The work involves assessing clarity, technical depth, methodology and usefulness for the engineers and researchers the material is intended to serve.
Manning Publications
Technical manuscripts and articles
As part of Manning’s reviewer community, I have provided technical feedback on books and articles in development across performance engineering, systems programming and data infrastructure.
Manning Publications
Latency
- Publisher
- Manning Publications
- Review completed
- June 2025
Participated in the manuscript review of Latency, providing technical feedback on a book focused on understanding and improving latency across modern software systems.
View the bookManning Publications
Systems Programming with Zig
- Publisher
- Manning Publications
- Review completed
- December 2025
Participated in the technical review of Systems Programming with Zig, a Manning manuscript in development covering systems programming concepts using the Zig programming language.
View the bookManning Publications
Apache Hudi in Action
- Publisher
- Manning Publications
- Review completed
- December 2025
Reviewed a manuscript on Apache Hudi and large-scale data platforms, evaluating its technical explanations, figures, code examples and usefulness for engineers working with distributed data and storage systems.
Manning Publications
Technical Articles Based on Zig in Action
- Scope
- Three technical article drafts
- Publisher
- Manning Publications
- Review completed
- December 2025
Evaluated three AI-assisted technical articles for accuracy, usefulness to software practitioners and consistency with the systems-programming concepts in the underlying book.
IEEE conference review
Active reviewer across multiple IEEE conferences
I actively participate in technical manuscript evaluation for IEEE conferences, reviewing work across computing, machine learning and data processing.
Recent participation ICMRACC 2025 · ISACC 2025
Technical Judging
Reviewing early ideas with practical engineering judgment
I evaluate professional hackathon projects for clarity of problem, technical execution, usefulness and the team’s ability to explain its tradeoffs.
ReverieHacks 2025
Professional hackathon projects across AI/ML, software, applications, embedded systems and social impact
View event ↗Telsem Hack 2025
Professional hackathon projects evaluated for originality, design, practical value and impact
View event ↗NovaSpark Pitch Competition
Startup pitches evaluated for innovation, feasibility, creativity and potential impact
View event ↗DragonHacks 2025
Professional hackathon submissions reviewed for technical execution, innovation and usefulness
View event ↗Coaching & Mentorship
Helping peers and industry leaders move forward
I offer free coaching to engineers, peers and industry leaders because mentorship is one of the ways I give back to the professional community.
Volunteer coaching · No fee100sof professionals supported in preparing for interview opportunities
I volunteer time to help people structure system-design discussions, communicate the significance of their work and prepare for engineering and leadership interviews. The aim is not to provide a formula; it is to help each person reason and communicate with greater clarity.
Engineering leadershipSystem designInterview strategyCareer storytelling
Explore free interview resources ↗Writing, talks and practical engineering resources
This site will continue to grow as I develop new articles, conference material and open resources.