Dhana Bala

Dhana Bala has over 9 years of experience in technology leadership roles. Dhana is currently the Chief Technology Officer at PacerPro. Prior to PacerPro, they were the 2021 Startup Recruitment - participant CTO Co-founder at Launch Factory. Dhana has also served as the Chief Technology Officer at Deep Sentinel and as the Team Lead, Identity and Access Management at Illumio. In addition, they were the Director and Head of Engineering at Plume Design, Inc. where they were a key participant on the executive leadership team charged with directing initiative to demonstrate Adaptive WiFi functionality in a field trial for Comcast with 10,000 access points.

Bala has a proven track record of success in building and leading engineering teams and developing innovative solutions. Dhana is a co-inventor of a vendor-agnostic work flow to activate and configure third-party access points (AP) from remote customer locations. Dhana also drove the technology-stack selection, architecture and development of a highly scalable and distributed cloud platform to: indefinitely store raw statistics coming from AP’s at a one-minute interval; aggregate raw statistics from AP’s to meaningful data for WiFi diagnostics and for a self-optimizing module to predict and push better configurations to troubled AP’s to improve client WiFi experience; and minimize cost per AP per month while hosting the solution on a public AWS cloud.

Bala holds a Bachelor’s degree in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.

Dhana Bala has a Master of Science in Computer Engineering from San Jose State University and a Bachelor of Engineering in Electrical and Electronics from the University of Kerala. Dhana also has certification from IEEE in Winner of IEEE Student Paper Contest (Kerala Chapter) - "PC based Spectrum Analyzer" and Winner of IEEE Student Paper Contest (Kerala Chapter) - "Static Mains Inverter".

Some direct reports include Christine Yee - Quality Assurance, Daniel Suh - Software Engineer, and Chris Osborn - Staff Software Engineer. Some of their coworkers include Amanda Schmidt - Customer Support, Chritopher Siegle - Technical Program Manager, and Anna McGrane - Co-Founder & COO. Dhana Bala reports to Gavin McGrane, Co-Founder & CEO.