Developer Platform Team · Hootsuite
Hi, I'm

Prafful Siddanati.

I build platforms that ship faster.

Intermediate Software Developer in Test II with 10+ years of experience — now building internal developer platforms, Backstage plugins, and the infrastructure that lets 350+ engineers move faster.

See my work Get in touch
01.

About me

I started my career as a Test Engineer and spent close to a decade getting very good at breaking things — automation frameworks, CI/CD pipelines, test strategies for enterprise-scale products. But I always wanted to build things, not just test them.

That shift happened when I joined Hootsuite's Quality Platform and then the Developer Platform team within the DevOps org. Today I build the internal tools and infrastructure that help our 350+ engineers ship better software, faster. My current focus is Spotify Backstage — designing plugin architectures, building REST APIs, running large-scale migrations, and now exposing the developer portal via MCP (Model Context Protocol) so AI tools can query service dependencies across our org.

I hold a Credential of Readiness from Harvard Business School Online (2025) — self-initiated — which sharpened my analytical thinking, financial literacy, and ability to understand the business impact of the systems I build.

Outside work: I organized Hoothack (company-wide hackathon, 50+ participants), volunteer with Greater Vancouver Food Bank, and was runner-up at Bug-A-Sur 2017.

10+
Years of experience
800+
Repos migrated via automated scripts
350+
Developers served by the platform
40%
CI/CD test run time reduction
02.

Experience

Mar 2019 — Present
Vancouver, BC
Intermediate Software Developer in Test II
Hootsuite Media Inc.
↳ Developer Platform Team (2023–Present)
  • Architected and built Backstage backend plugins end-to-end (TypeScript, Knex, OpenAPI): a custom entity metadata service exposing REST APIs for tagging catalog entities with arbitrary properties — used by MCP to query compliance, EOL status, and stack versions across 350+ services — and a team management plugin providing full CRUD for internal Group entities with identity-provider-validated membership and Slack/email contact management.
  • Designed the OpenAPI schema from scratch for the entity-properties plugin, generated typed client models, and established the cross-plugin contract pattern (backend / common / frontend) now used as the standard plugin structure across the platform.
  • Built and executed automated migration scripts (TypeScript) across 800+ repositories — extracting legacy service catalog data, backfilling ownership and tier metadata, generating standardized portal config files, and auto-creating pull requests via the GitHub API — reducing a weeks-long manual effort to hours.
  • Exposed the Developer Portal via MCP (Model Context Protocol) so internal services and AI tools can query service dependencies, async messaging topic ownership, and tech stack compliance in real time.
  • Set up observability and alerting: Grafana + Prometheus alerts for PostgreSQL limits and catalog sync failures; Sumo Logic scheduled alerts; ArgoCD deployment failure alerts — all surfaced to Slack.
  • Authored Cursor AI rules (.mdc) to standardize AI-assisted development practices across the platform team.
  • Integrated Vault secrets following DevOps security guidelines and provisioned with the POD team.
  • Wrote Playwright smoke tests (TypeScript) post-staging and post-prod deployments, fully configured in Jenkins CI/CD — leveraging AI tooling to complete in a single day.
  • Configured Snyk vulnerability scanning jobs in Jenkins to proactively catch security issues in the platform codebase.
↳ Quality Platform & Product QA Teams (2019–2023)
  • Migrated CI/CD pipelines from Mesos to Kubernetes, reducing build and deployment time by 30%.
  • Orchestrated UI test parallelization on CI/CD, cutting run time by 40%.
  • Added 130+ Playwright UI tests and 50+ REST API tests, increasing automation coverage by 40%.
  • Built a Jenkins shared library solution to automatically retry flaky tests, saving 16 minutes per run.
  • Improved test suite reliability from 50% to 85% through framework-level solutions.
  • Developed Docker build images with TechOps to streamline org-wide Playwright adoption.
  • Led Saucelabs cross-browser POC, resulting in organization-wide adoption.
  • Reported quality metrics to Grafana and SumoLogic dashboards for enterprise-wide visibility.
Jan 2017 — Dec 2018
Bangalore, India
Software Engineer (QA)
Coviam Technologies Pvt. Ltd.
  • Automated 80+ e-commerce APIs, accelerating regression testing by 50%.
  • Built 30+ automation scripts using Selenium, JBehave, Cucumber, and REST Assured (Spring Boot).
  • Evaluated product recommendations via Apache Spark on GCP, improving click-through rate from 0.1% to 0.4% for Blibli.com (Indonesia).
  • Achieved ~75% automation coverage across the project.
Jul 2014 — Jan 2017
Chennai, India
Test Engineer
Caterpillar India Pvt. Ltd. (via Randstad)
  • Validated Salesforce-hosted telematics web apps; executed 150+ test cases and 30+ SOAP API validations.
  • Served as interim QA Lead for 4 months, ensuring timely defect resolution during client-facing calls.
  • Awarded Best Quality Analyst Award for metric reporting to the Engineering Imperative Team.
03.

Skills

Languages
TypeScript JavaScript Java Python Groovy Go PHP SQL Shell
Platform & Backend
Backstage Knex.js OpenAPI MCP REST APIs Zod React Node.js Vault PostgreSQL Kafka
DevOps & Infra
Kubernetes Docker ArgoCD Jenkins GitHub Actions CI/CD Linux Snyk
Observability
Grafana Prometheus Sumo Logic New Relic Splunk
Testing & Automation
Playwright Cypress Selenium REST Assured Postman Saucelabs BDD/TDD
Databases
PostgreSQL MySQL MongoDB Redis Apache Solr
04.

Key highlights

⬡
Backstage Plugin Architecture
Designed and built the cross-plugin contract pattern (backend / common / frontend) now standard across the platform. Delivered a custom entity metadata service and team management plugin end-to-end with OpenAPI schemas, Knex DAOs, audit trails, and catalog sync.
TypeScript · Knex · OpenAPI · PostgreSQL
◈
MCP-Powered Service Intelligence
Exposed the Developer Portal via Model Context Protocol — enabling AI tools and internal services to query live service metadata: tech stack versions, EOL compliance, async messaging topic ownership, and service dependencies across 350+ services.
MCP · Entity Properties API · Real-time
⟳
800-Repo Migration at Scale
Built TypeScript scripts to extract legacy service catalog data, backfill ownership and tier metadata, generate standardized portal config files, and auto-create GitHub PRs across 800+ repositories — collapsing weeks of manual work into hours.
800+ repos · GitHub API · Zero downtime
△
Observability & Alerting Platform
Set up end-to-end alerting for the developer portal: Grafana + Prometheus for PostgreSQL limits and catalog sync health, Sumo Logic scheduled reports, ArgoCD deployment alerts, and Snyk vulnerability scanning — all surfaced to Slack.
Grafana · Prometheus · ArgoCD · Snyk
⬜
CI/CD Optimization
Migrated pipelines from Mesos to Kubernetes (30% faster builds), parallelized UI test suites (40% run time reduction), and built a Jenkins shared library for auto-retry of flaky tests saving 16 minutes per run.
Kubernetes · Jenkins · 40% faster
✦
Harvard CORe · 2025
Self-initiated Credential of Readiness from Harvard Business School Online. Strengthened strategic thinking, financial literacy, and analytical frameworks — applied to understanding business impact of platform decisions.
Self-initiated · Business · Analytics
05. what's next?

Get in touch

I'm not actively looking right now, but I'm always open to interesting conversations about platform engineering, developer tooling, or SDET roles. My inbox is open.

Say hello
hello@prafful.ca LinkedIn 778 877 7218