Professional record / 2012 to present

Navaneeth Rao

Staff Software Engineer building dependable cloud platforms, ML infrastructure, and high-scale backend systems.

13+
years engineering
$3M+
cost savings
99.99%
uptime delivered
3
cloud platforms

Professional Summary

Staff Software Engineer with 13+ years building distributed platforms, ML serving systems, and developer infrastructure. Technical leadership spanning architecture governance, cross-team mentorship, and teams of up to 10 engineers.

Deep expertise in Java, Kubernetes, AWS, and GCP, with an MS in Computer Science and an MBA. Outcomes include $3M+ in infrastructure cost savings and 99.99% uptime.

Experience

Staff Software Engineer

Walmart
Apr 2024 – Present
  • Migrated Walmart Search clusters from single-tenant to secure multi-tenant Kubernetes model serving, improving availability to 99.9% and reducing inference latency by 25%.
  • Designed multi-tier inference routing across multi-tenant, multi-locale environments supporting hundreds of millions of daily queries.
  • Engineered query normalization and tokenization adopted across Search teams, and established architecture governance and distributed systems training programs.

Staff Software Engineer

PayPal
Feb 2023 – Apr 2024
  • Engineered a Financial Risk Reporting platform on GCP processing 10M+ daily transactions for fraud detection and chargeback analytics.
  • Orchestrated a Databricks analytics platform (30% efficiency gain), migrated core workflows from RDBMS to DynamoDB (30% cost reduction), and led ORM-based data-layer modernization that cut the feature-to-production lifecycle by 50%.

Senior Software Engineer

Ford Motor Company
Oct 2019 – Feb 2023
  • Designed the Azure Right-to-Provision service automating subscription creation and budget management for 5,000+ engineers.
  • Built a TypeScript RBAC system with automated cloud billing, led end-to-end delivery of the Cloud Portal 2.0 developer experience platform, and built a Java/Kafka observability system reducing mean time to detection for incidents.

Software Engineer / Team Lead

IBM
Aug 2016 – Sep 2019
  • Led monitoring and alerting across 50+ data centers and 10,000 servers with Icinga, Grafana, and PagerDuty, maintaining 99.99% uptime for IBM Cloud.
  • Built a 500 TB/day logging pipeline with Logstash, Kafka, Elasticsearch, and Kibana informing $3M+ in cost reductions.
  • Led a cross-functional team of 10 engineers and served as SME for L1 escalations on a 15-minute SLA.

Service Engineer Intern

Microsoft
May 2015 – Aug 2015
  • Overhauled the in-house Azure billing system in Java, delivering a 40% performance improvement and increased pipeline reliability.
  • Implemented Cassandra data modeling and query optimization for a real-time analytics platform, achieving 50% faster data retrieval.

Senior Systems Engineer

Infosys
Aug 2012 – Aug 2014
  • Delivered web-security projects for ANZ Bank using Java and the Spring Framework.
  • Developed an Android OTP authentication app that reduced unauthorized access by 50%.
  • Trained 5 interns in the Finacle e-Banking Framework and RESTful API design; all five shipped features to production.

Technical Skills

Education

MBA, Business Administration · GPA 3.95

Gies College of Business, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
2022 – 2024

MS, Computer Science · Machine Learning & Big Data · GPA 3.9

The University of Texas at Dallas
2014 – 2016

B.Eng, Information Science

Visvesvaraya Technological University
2008 – 2012

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