Meet Our Senior Open Source Software Engineer, Ash Narkar!

As part of our spotlight series highlighting members of the Styra team, we can’t wait for you to meet our Senior Open Source Software Engineer, Ash Narkar! 

I graduated from the University of Mumbai with a Bachelor’s of Engineering. After graduating, I decided to go back to school for my Master’s Degree in Computer Science at Carnegie Mellon University. I had grown up watching Full House and had always wanted to visit San Francisco. I really wanted to drive across the Golden Gate Bridge as they did in the opening credits. So when I got an offer from Cyan, a start-up in California, it seemed like a no-brainer to say yes and move out West. It ended up being a good call because I ended up meeting Torin Sandall (the future Vice President of Open Source at Styra) while working there. I left Cyan to take a position as Principal Engineer at Verizon Labs to work on Verizon’s IoT cloud services. I ended up randomly grabbing drinks to catch up with Torin, which is where I was introduced to Styra and Open Policy Agent (OPA). I loved the mission and product, so I joined the team as a Senior Engineer, Open Source. 

I am an engineer on the open source team at Styra. My main focuses are OPA development, including creating new features, evangelizing OPA and growing the community. I spend my day working to solve some really challenging problems and how to best engage with the community. I always want to be thinking about how we can keep our current users happy and grow the project to meet their evolving needs. 

I like that my position is a great mix of technical and community. It has been amazing being a part of OPA’s growth. When I joined the team a few years ago there were a lot of people who didn’t know what OPA was. I was going to conferences to introduce the project for the first time to many people. Now when I go to conferences, people not only know what OPA is but, they are also excited to share how they are using it. The OPA Slack channel used to have maybe 300 members in total. Now we have over 3,000 members. It has been great to be able to engage with the community to get feedback directly from users and learn all the new ways they are utilizing OPA. 

Another fun aspect of my job is creating new features to keep OPA the de-facto standard for authorization. It is hard to get to the top but it is even harder to stay there. It takes a lot of work to ensure you are growing with the needs of the community and evolving technology. It is a challenge that the whole open source team loves to take on. 

OPA is one of a kind — there is nothing else like it. The people who use it really love it, not only because it is the de-facto standard for authorization, but because of the community around it. OPA users want to contribute back to the community and help to continue growing the project. Users embrace it because it is solving their problems and they enjoy using it. This is why we have seen such amazing organic growth and support. 

I had worked at a mid-stage start-up before and was interested in joining a start-up still in its early stage. I wanted to go through the journey from start to finish. I had worked with Torin previously, so I trusted that if he was praising a project or company, it was going to be a great place to be. Styra had about ten employees when I first joined. My interview process included lunch with the entire company in attendance. From that first lunch, I could tell that this was a very smart and very kind group of people. It was a group of people who you could talk about everything with — not only tech. Most importantly, the team understood that for Styra to be successful, we needed to succeed as individuals and as a team. While early-stage start-ups have a lot of ups and downs, I loved that we would celebrate even the smallest wins in the beginning. We celebrated buying a sparkling water dispenser for the office. Celebrating these small accomplishments made them feel bigger. We have bigger accomplishments to celebrate now, but we still have a culture of coming together to celebrate those wins together. 

The product itself was also a huge draw for me. Authentication had already mostly been solved, but authorization was niche at the time. We knew authorization was going to be a big issue in the industry, but no one else was really working to solve the problem. It was very enticing to me because it was so ahead of its time. I wanted to be a part of solving cloud-native authorization. 

I was interested in doing work beyond the technical aspect of my role. This position gave me the opportunity to present at conferences, meet community members and see how OPA was being used across the world. I hadn’t worked with the open source community before and I really wanted to have that experience. 

Success is something that gives you a sense of satisfaction. How you define success is up to you. Success for someone could be buying a house, while someone else sees success as buying ten houses. It is up to the individual to determine what their goals are and what will make them happy in life. Success doesn’t have to equal perfection. If you have given your all to something and feel satisfied with the outcome, that is all that matters in the end.

I would build furniture. When my wife and I bought our first home, we didn’t want to spend a lot of money on furniture and decided to DIY it. My first project was a king-size rustic bed, followed by a coffee table and table for the dining room. I’ve found it to be a really fun hobby.

Tubthumping (I Get Knocked Down) by Chumbawamba. I like it because it personifies life. You will get knocked down a lot in life, but that doesn’t matter. What matters is that you get back up and try again. 

Andaz Apna Apna. It is a very goofy, funny movie. It’s a slapstick comedy that might not be Oscar-worthy, but it is a lot of fun to watch.  

I am a dog person. I grew up with Pomeranians. I currently have a poodle who is six but still acts like a puppy. 

Ava