Manik Surtani is a mission-driven technologist and engineering leader with 17 years of experience building high-performance distributed systems, cloud platforms, and developer infrastructure. He currently leads Platform and Cloud engineering for Cash App at Block, previously founded and led Infinispan and JBoss Data Grid efforts at Red Hat, and has deep expertise in data grids, caching, and distributed transaction consistency. A practical open-source contributor, Manik has hands-on experience modernizing build and deployment workflows—adding containerization support and upgrading Java/Gradle ecosystems—and has fixed critical bugs in widely used projects like Infinispan. He combines entrepreneurial instincts from multiple startup co‑founder roles with enterprise-scale leadership across continents, and serves as a scout for Sequoia Capital supporting early-stage founders. Known for bridging research-grade distributed systems thinking with pragmatic operational engineering, he holds a first-class BSc in Computing from Swansea University and is based in Sydney.
17 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
BSc (1st class honours), Computing, BSc (1st class honours), Computing at Swansea University
Infinispan is an open source data grid platform and highly scalable NoSQL cloud data store.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:1711 commits in 5 years
Contributions summary:Manik primarily contributed to bug fixes and improvements in the Infinispan project, focusing on cache store and transaction-related issues. Their work included fixing tests, improving retry handling, and addressing issues with managing write skew checks and entry passivation. Furthermore, the user made various code improvements to enhance data consistency and ensure proper handling of remote transactions.
Contributions:19 commits, 17 PRs, 19 pushes in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Manik contributed to the `misk` repository, which is a microservice framework. Their work involved adding Dockerfile and related instructions, indicating a focus on containerization and deployment. The user also upgraded dependencies, specifically JUnit, demonstrating familiarity with testing frameworks. Furthermore, the user updated the project to support Java 9 and upgraded Gradle, showing involvement in build and environment management.
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Manik Surtani - VP Of Engineering, Platform And Cloud