Summary
Rahul Vadaga is a Senior Software Engineer II based in New York with 12 years of experience building large-scale distributed systems, currently focused on retrieval and ANN infrastructure at Etsy. He designs resilient services in Rust and Python, led capacity planning and remediation for a sharded retrieval service, and improved on-call experience by halving paging from Kafka-based pipelines. Rahul has engineered Kubernetes monitoring for seamless index upgrades, integrated Vertex AI Vector Search to avoid private cloud IP exhaustion, and delivered A/B test filters that directly improved product metrics. His background spans backend ad systems in PHP/JavaScript, OCR research tooling at IIIT Hyderabad, and embedded control work during an early internship, reflecting broad systems thinking from hardware to cloud. He holds an MS in Computer Science from NYU and a dual degree in Electrical Engineering from IIT Madras, blending academic rigor with production-facing impact. Colleagues rely on him for pragmatic debugging, mentoring new team members, and shipping high-availability services under pressure.
11 years of coding experience
7 years of employment as a software developer
Indian Institute of Technology Madras
Master of Science - MS, Computer Science, Master of Science - MS, Computer Science at New York University