// about
Hi, I'm Raj.
I build data platforms and the teams that run them. This site is where I share what I learn along the way.
I'm an engineering manager at Calix in Bangalore, where I lead the Data & Analytics Platform team, building our AI-ready, next-generation data platform on Google Cloud. Before that I spent over a decade as an engineer, moving from writing schedulers to designing streaming systems that process billions of events a day.
What I care about most is making data platforms that people trust: correct, observable, cheap to run, and boring in production. Most of the interesting problems sit where distributed systems meet people, so that's what I write about.
Outside work I'm doing a PhD at IIT Patna on scalable data systems, and I wrote Hello Modern Data Pipelines (BPB, 2026), a practical guide to designing and operating modern data pipelines.
The journey so far
- 2011
ValuePitch
First job. Wrote a cloud task scheduler and learned that production is a different planet.
- 2012
Samsung R&D
Recommendation systems and monitoring for 10,000+ servers. Fell for distributed systems.
- 2016
Pitney Bowes
Spark at scale: distributed geocoding and merging messy location data with ML.
- 2018
Expedia Group
Security data streaming. Hundreds of jobs, terabytes a day, and my first teams to lead.
- 2022
Calixnow
Staff Engineer → Principal Engineer → leading the Data & Analytics Platform team. Now building an AI-ready, next-generation data platform.
Let's connect
My full work history, projects and recommendations are on LinkedIn. I'm always happy to talk about data platforms, migrations or engineering leadership.