Summary
Karunya Tota is a senior software engineer with nine years of experience building backend product services, currently shaping Food & Beverage server products at Square in San Francisco. A CS@Illinois '18 graduate who also studied at EPFL, Karunya has deep experience in payment and payroll systems from roles across Square, Panorama Education, Yelp, and Goldman Sachs. They focus on data-driven design for social impact domains—education, financial literacy, healthcare, and public policy—bringing quantitative thinking to product decisions. Comfortable shipping production services at scale, Karunya blends research-minded problem solving (early computer vision REU work) with pragmatic engineering for real-world platforms. Colleagues describe them as a reliable backend engineer who prefers measurable outcomes and long-lived, maintainable systems.
9 years of coding experience
4 years of employment as a software developer
High School International Baccalaureate Program, High School International Baccalaureate Program at International Baccalaureate
Computer Science, Computer Science at EPFL
Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science, Bachelor of Science (B.S.) Computer Science at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign
English, Telugu