Rajat Venkatesh
Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolRajat Venkatesh is a seasoned software engineer with 12 years of deep expertise in distributed databases, query engines, and cloud platforms, currently working at StarTree in Bengaluru. He has driven high-impact projects across companies like LinkedIn, Yugabyte and Qubole—ranging from org-wide observability for Big Data stacks to transactional Change Data Capture and performance-first features for OLAP systems. Rajat combines hands-on systems coding (notably contributions to Apache Pinot’s index-building robustness) with product and team leadership that scaled Presto and Hive usage multi-fold. He’s strong at triaging production latency through tracing and ASH-style sampling, and often bridges compatibility gaps between Postgres semantics and distributed storage. Quietly practical, he pairs deep low-level performance optimizations with customer-facing examples and docs to accelerate adoption.
12 years of coding experience
20 years of employment as a software developer
B.E., B.E. at B. M. S. College of EngineeringCarnegie Mellon University
Stackoverflow
128reputation
3kreached
4answers
1question
Github Skills (32)
debugging10
apache-pinot10
c-language10
postgresql10
databases10
java10
javas10
exception-handling10
cprogramming-language10
distributed-database10
sql-database10
database10
develop9
json-parser9
json9
Programming languages (11)
Github contributions (5)
apache/pinot
Dec 2023 - Aug 2025
Apache Pinot - A realtime distributed OLAP datastore
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:370 reviews, 59 PRs, 537 comments in 1 year 8 months
Contributions summary:Rajat primarily contributed to improving exception handling and error messages within the Apache Pinot codebase, specifically during index building processes. They focused on providing more informative error messages, including column names, to aid debugging. Their work also involved creating a reproducer for a JSON parsing error during index build and using the + operator for string concatenation within the code. Additionally, they added support to detect and set a gauge when expired messages are detected within Kafka.
apache-pinotolapjava
yugabyte/cdcsdk-server
May 2022 - Jan 2023
A standalone CDC channel to move CDC events from YugabyteDB database to different sinks.
Contributions:10 releases, 77 reviews, 83 commits in 8 months
cdcdatabaseyugabytedb
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