Pranjal Shankhdhar
Member Of Technical Staff at xAI
San Francisco Bay Area United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolPranjal Shankhdhar is a seasoned backend engineer with nine years of experience building high-performance distributed systems and query engines, now based in the San Francisco Bay Area. He has driven production-critical work at Meta (Presto/Velox and Buck2), improving query planning, history-based optimizations, and remote execution at multi-billion-action scale—contributions that are actively used across major data warehouses. His open-source patches span Velox and Presto (query planning, DWRF reader fixes, join/null-skew stats) and Buck (remote exec logging and robust fallbacks), reflecting a focus on performance, observability, and correctness. Pranjal also spent time at OpenAI and currently works on foundational systems at xAI, blending deep systems expertise with practical debugging and optimization instincts. Trained at IIT Kharagpur with combined B.S./M.S. in Computer Science, he couples research-informed techniques with hands-on production delivery.
9 years of coding experience
5 years of employment as a software developer
Bachelors + Masters Computer Science, Bachelors + Masters Computer Science at Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur
Github Skills (30)
algorithm10
algorithms10
c-language10
back-end-development10
query-optimization10
data-management10
data-structure10
java10
javas10
query-parser10
sql10
performance-optimization10
build-automation10
data-structures10
query-engine10
Programming languages (5)
Github contributions (5)
prestodb/presto
Jun 2021 - Dec 2022
The official home of the Presto distributed SQL query engine for big data
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:661 reviews, 84 commits, 211 PRs in 1 year 6 months
Contributions summary:Pranjal made several contributions related to Presto's query planning and execution engine. Their work included fixing errors in ordering, adding support for SQL functions related to array manipulation, implementing CREATE TYPE syntax, and incorporating enhancements to support features like EXCEPT, INTERSECT, and LEFT OUTER JOIN in materialized view queries. Additionally, the user addressed bugs related to plan optimization and data handling, which improved the system's accuracy and functionality.
distributed-sqlquerybigdataquery-enginesql
facebook/buck
Nov 2019 - Nov 2020
A fast build system that encourages the creation of small, reusable modules over a variety of platforms and languages.
Role in this project:Back-end Developer & Automation Engineer
Back-end Developer & Automation EngineerContributions:29 commits in 1 year
Contributions summary:Pranjal primarily focused on enhancing the remote execution capabilities within the Buck build system. Their contributions involved adding logging for gRPC status codes, exit codes, and action metadata to provide better insights into build failures and performance. They implemented a killswitch to control local fallbacks and made improvements to serialization of protobuf messages. These changes focused on improving the reliability and debugging of remote build executions.
buckpythonplatformsandroidlanguages
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