About

Kunal Mittal is a highly experienced Senior Engineering Manager at Reliance Retail, with over 11 years of experience in software development. He has a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Illinois at Chicago, where he also worked as a Researcher for 1.5 years. Kunal has worked with several top companies, including LinkedIn, 99acres.com, and Shiksha.com, which is part of the Info Edge group. At Shiksha.com, he worked as a Technical Architect, delivering several critical projects, including a Tag Entity Recommendation System using collaborative filtering, Spark, Scala, Amazon EMR, and Amazon S3. He also developed a Reviews Topic Modelling system using NLP technologies and an Analytics System that analyzes Naukri.com resume data and merges it with Shiksha.com's educational domain data. Additionally, he built the Shiksha Student Predictor Tool using Machine Learning technologies like Keras, TensorFlow, and Deep Learning. Currently, Kunal is leading one of the Backend Engineering teams at Reliance Retail, managing a team of 16 engineers working on Backend Java, Python, and PHP APIs. He spends most of his time coding and designing software, and his role involves architecting solutions and prototyping. Kunal has experience in various technologies, including Big Data (Apache Spark, Hadoop, Pig), Machine Learning (Deep Learning, Keras, TensorFlow), Search Engines (Apache Solr, Elasticsearch), Recommendation Systems (Solr and Collaborative Filtering based), Cloud Technologies (AWS EMR, AWS S3, AWS SQS), Text Mining, Data Mining, Natural Language Processing, and Information Retrieval. Throughout his career, Kunal has delivered several critical projects, including a unified search experience at Airtel Wynk, which resulted in the session-wise CTR improving from 37% to 67%. He has also developed a new Deep Learning-based spelling correction microservice using Keras and Python. Kunal is a highly skilled individual contributor, and he reports directly to the CTO in his current and past roles. He is proficient in several programming languages, including Java, PHP, Python, Ruby, and MySQL. He has experience working with microservices, neural networks, n-grams, RabbitMQ, and Kafka.