Senior Software Engineer at Veeam USA

How Abhay Arnikar Went from Startup Acquisition to Building AI Tools Used Across the Engineering Team

Abhay Arnikar joined Veeam as a Senior Software Engineer through an acquisition. His startup, Alcion, was brought into Veeam in late 2024 to build something that did not yet exist inside the company: a native backup as a service platform. Within months of joining, he was promoted and handed a broader scope, building core infrastructure that external teams across Veeam now depend on.

"The amount of autonomy I have to just execute on my ideas is something I really appreciate about being at Veeam. Whenever I build something, no one comes in and says, why are you doing this? They're always pretty encouraging."

Abhay joined the control plane backend team for Veeam Data Cloud, Veeam's backup as a service platform. At Alcion, he was working within an existing, mature system, while at Veeam he was building base modules from scratch that teams far beyond his own would come to depend on.

What Does It Actually Look Like to Build Core Infrastructure as a Senior Software Engineer at Veeam USA?

When Abhay arrived at Veeam, the first month or two were about finding his footing, working through the early stages of Alcion's acquisition and helping bring its product and customers over to Veeam. It's the kind of chapter that comes with a growing company, bringing in new engineers with fresh perspectives and hard-won experience.

By January 2025, the team had a clear plan, and from that point the work moved quickly. His focus became the subscription layer of Veeam Data Cloud: enabling the creation of customer subscriptions and building the services that connect those subscriptions to Salesforce through Veeam's Commerce Platform (Carp Tech). What he built became the connective tissue between Veeam's commercial systems and the platform customers actually use. The scope brought new challenges beyond code, requiring him to work across multiple teams and time zones while navigating competing priorities from different stakeholders.

The scope of the work had increased, the number of people I had to interact with had increased. There were technical and collaboration challenges that grew as I started working at Veeam. I had enough guidance from my managers to deal with those kinds of scenarios.

Abhay Arnikar

Senior Software Engineer

How Does a Senior Software Engineer at Veeam USA Create Impact Beyond Their Day-to-Day Work?

When Abhay finds a process that slows him down, he builds something to fix it and makes it available to the tech team.

The clearest example is the Claude skills framework he built after Anthropic released Claude Code. As a developer, Abhay was spending significant time on repetitive workflow tasks: creating Jira tickets and writing design documents in Confluence, each step requiring him to switch context and manually enter information that already existed in the conversation he was having with the agent.

He built a set of composable Claude skills that handle all of it automatically. Based on the context of a coding conversation, the framework creates pull requests and Jira tickets automatically, and posts design documents to Confluence when the trade-offs in a solution warrant one. At the end of each two-week sprint, a separate skill cleans up the Jira board, updating ticket statuses without anyone having to touch them manually.

"I've created these skills which automatically create pull requests and tickets based on the context of the conversation. If a ticket doesn't exist, it prompts you to check whether one should be created, then goes ahead and does it after you've planned out what you want to work on."

What started as a personal tool is now used by eight to ten engineers on the team, with a standup feature contributed by a teammate that pulls data from GitHub and Jira to post an async standup summary to Confluence each morning. Abhay built the initial framework and the composable architecture underneath it, and the team is now building on top of it.

How Quickly Does Veeam USA Act When Engineers Suggest New Tools or Ways of Working?

In most engineering organisations, suggesting a new tool means waiting for approval before watching it sit in a backlog, but that has not been Abhay's experience at Veeam.

When Anthropic released Claude-based code reviews, Abhay posted about it on Teams, and within an hour a staff engineer had enabled it for the repositories the team uses.

"I've never worked in an organisation that works so quickly in terms of enabling things or making engineers feel heard. I recommended it and someone went ahead and enabled it."

That speed prompted him to go further, as the team was running multiple AI reviewers on pull requests and he wanted to know which was actually catching the most useful issues. He built a tool that analysed around 100 pull requests on one of the team's repositories, categorising the types of bugs each reviewer caught and measuring the signal quality of each. The findings are now informing a larger question: whether Veeam should build a custom review solution with deeper context from its own design documents and Jira tickets to produce higher quality AI reviews than off-the-shelf tools can provide.

What Is the Culture Like on the Engineering Team at Veeam USA?

Ideas and decisions happen in open Teams channels rather than private messages, which means useful context surfaces in conversations that might otherwise stay within a small group.

"If someone's working on one approach, and another engineer has a suggestion to do things differently, it just surfaces because you're having these conversations in public."

For Abhay, who had worked in smaller, more closed environments before joining Alcion and then Veeam, the shift took some adjustment. Moving from a twenty-person startup to a team of five hundred engineers meant more visibility on everything he posted. Over time, he found the culture of openness more manageable than he had expected. His manager checks in when output drops, asking whether something needs unblocking. The team responds when asked for help, and the culture is straightforward: if you need something, say so.

What Kinds of Learning and Growth Opportunities Are Available to Engineers at Veeam USA?

Veeam covers access to Claude Code and associated tools, as well as conference attendance and learning resources when they are relevant to what an engineer is working on. Abhay attended GopherCon in his first year at Veeam. Looking ahead, his interest has moved toward AI-focused events, which is part of why he relocated from Buffalo, New York to San Jose.

"I wanted to be more exposed to how things are changing with AI in the Bay Area. It's the epicentre of most of the changes happening in AI."

The growth Abhay values most at Veeam comes from the scope of what he is trusted to work on: building from scratch and owning the architecture of something that external teams depend on, with the room to experiment without having to justify every hour spent on it.

Why Join the Engineering Team at Veeam USA?

Veeam gives engineers building real infrastructure the room to go further than their job description. Abhay Arnikar joined through an acquisition and was promoted within his first year, since then building tools that other engineers across the team have adopted into their daily workflows. The control plane work feeds directly into Veeam Data Cloud, a product used by businesses to protect their most critical data. The AI tooling is modern, and the culture is built around public communication and transparency. If you want to build things that matter and be trusted to decide how you build them, this is the environment for it. Go fearlessly forward on our USA team now.