About

Rahul Balakavi is a Principal Engineer at Thoughtspot with over 9 years of experience in the tech industry. With a background in Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Rahul pursued a Master's degree in Computer Science from Penn State University. His passion for solving impactful problems that make a positive difference to the world has led him to specialize in building highly relevant search and recommendation systems that focus on content-discovery. At Thoughtspot, Rahul leads research, prototyping, and development of NLP-based initiatives, and is responsible for tech-leading natural language question answering using semantic signals and translation. In his previous role as Senior Staff Engineer, he managed a full-stack team of 6 developers responsible for improving indexing and search-quality for metadata discovery search of Thoughtspot. Rahul also led a team of 5 to deliver autocomplete capabilities for metadata discovery search and helped drive product initiatives to improve metadata-discovery-search click-rate by 25% and number of searches by 50%. His contributions earned him the "Operational-Excellence" award for Thoughtspot in 2021. Rahul initiated the process of pre-mortems before any significant feature to ensure there is a high likelihood of success once implementation is complete. He created a culture of accountability and discipline in the team, where any major sev-0/sev-1 issue is followed up by a 5-whys style analysis to ensure learnings are prioritized. Rahul is also experienced in leading prototyping of metadata-discovery search, which involved creating the first multi-tenant SaaS service for Thoughtspot, leveraging technologies like Kubernetes, Elasticsearch, and Kafka. He proposed and implemented the idea of exposing RED & USE metrics from each microservice and also involved in setting up the generic dashboard in grafana, usable for all microservices. Rahul's education history includes a Bachelor's degree in Electrical and Electronics from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani, and a Master's degree in Computer Science from Penn State University. He also completed a course on Coursera. Rahul's tech stack includes Research Scientist, Search, Recommendation system, Senior Software Engineer, NLP, Microservices, Software Engineer, Kubernetes, Elastic Search, and Kafka. Rahul is interested in full-time principal-engineering/software-architect roles that focus on solving impactful problems that make a positive difference to the world.