Nikhil Thota
Member Of Technical Staff at Perplexity AI
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNikhil Thota is a Member of Technical Staff based in San Francisco with 11 years of experience building scalable infrastructure and product-facing systems at the intersection of search, LLMs, and social graph engineering. He’s currently Eng #2 at Perplexity AI, bringing expertise from founding a personal-search startup and early engineering roles at Texts.com (acquired by Automattic) to product and infra work at WhatsApp/Meta. His background spans safety and trust features, real-time communications, and developer tooling—from shipping Marketplace safety products to an Erlang microservice for WhatsApp QR codes and server-driven sync improvements. A Kleiner Perkins engineering fellow and serial builder, he also explores web3 visualization and has taught CS topics, reflecting both entrepreneurial curiosity and mentorship experience. He studied computer science while doubling as a classical bassoonist, a hint at disciplined creativity that shows up in his product instincts. Colleagues would describe him as a pragmatic engineer who moves between startup scrappiness and large-scale system reliability.
11 years of coding experience
9 years of employment as a software developer
Charles III University of Madrid (Universidad Carlos III de Madrid)CS + Music (Bassoon), CS + Music (Bassoon) at University of Florida
English, Telugu, Spanish
Github Skills (32)
spin9
visualize9
obsidian8
inference8
tooling7
llama7
android-library7
vulnerabilities7
full-text-search7
database6
knowledge-management6
ai6
security6
search-engine6
rust5
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
nt92/REVAMP
Feb 2017 - Aug 2019
Contributions:4 PRs, 51 pushes, 3 branches in 2 years 6 months
nt92/Expression-Calculator
Nov 2015 - Jun 2020
Contributions:2 pushes, 1 branch in 4 years 7 months
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