About

Rajesh Muppalla is a seasoned technology leader with over 21 years of experience in building and scaling large-scale distributed systems. He is currently serving as the Senior Director of Engineering at Avalara, a leading provider of cloud-based tax compliance solutions. Rajesh is also a co-founder and former Director of Engineering at Indix, a product intelligence platform for retailers and brands. At Indix, he led the data platform team that was responsible for collecting, organizing, and structuring product-related data from the web. His team built and ran a large-scale data processing and analytics system that processed hundreds of millions of products and billions of prices daily, using technologies such as Hadoop, Map-Reduce, HBase, Scalding, Spark, Kiji, Solr, and Elastic Search. Rajesh is passionate about big data, large-scale distributed systems, continuous delivery, and algorithms. He is also an advocate of open-source technologies and agile methodologies. Throughout his career, he has mentored and coached developers in pursuit of building better software. Prior to Indix, Rajesh was a technical lead on Go-CD, an open-source agile and release management product, at Thoughtworks. In his earlier stints at Thoughtworks, he served as a technical lead on multiple customer projects in the domains of e-commerce and social media. He started his career at Indigo Architects, a travel product startup, where he played multiple roles, allowing him to hone his entrepreneurial, technical, and people skills. Rajesh holds a gold medal in Computer Science from Pune University, and in his final year of graduation, his team represented India at the Asia finals of Microsoft Imagine Cup (then called Microsoft .NET campus challenge). Rajesh's technical expertise includes large-scale distributed systems, big data, continuous delivery, design patterns, microservices, and search technologies such as Elastic Search. He is proficient in programming languages such as Scala, Akka, and Spark. Rajesh's diverse experiences have equipped him with a unique perspective on building and scaling technology products and teams.