# Neil Johari

> Staff Software Engineer at Roblox

Location: San Mateo, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/neiljohari

building cool stuff

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer @ Roblox
Jan 2021 – Present | San Mateo, CA
- Served as Incident Manager On Call (IMOC) in a two-quarter rotational program
- Proposed & implemented solution to backend feature flagging in core framework, used by 40+ services & presented to company in tech talk
- Proposed & implemented automatic distributed tracing improvement across ~2.2k microservices, presented in tech talk

Tour of Duty:
- Contributed to ~⅓ of the 2024 Time-To-Interactivity (TTI) improvements
- Co-led TTI feature flag fetching improvements: implemented Zstandard compression with shared dictionaries in app, engine, CDN and backend. Achieved 90% payload reduction, resulting in up to 700ms p95 improvement on Android, 1s p95 on macOS, and 1s p95 on iOS & Windows.

Creator > Content Understanding Platform Team:
- Tech Lead for Content Search, spearheaded 2-quarter re-architect coordinating 6 teams.
    * 50-60% decrease in search latency (p99 250-500ms improvement)
    * Reduced operational cost (collapsed 18 services to 3)
    * Reduced experimentation setup from 1-2 weeks to 1-2 days
    * Upheld high quality bar: linter-enforced style guide, 100% line coverage, isolated CI tests, rollout integration testing, automated canary testing, smoke alarms
- Built agentic content interrogation workflows with Temporal

Creator > Store Team:
- Shipped vector semantic search (~8.5% increase in search metrics); proposed & implemented ML blending + re-ranking algorithms
- Sped up CI/CD by ~30x, migrated Drone to GHA
- Rewrote data pipelines in Airflow2, reducing runtime ~7x; later migrated to Tecton
- Restored team services following 3 day outage
- Researched & implemented algorithm to surface trending results
- Successfully migrated backend search infra with 0 downtime or parity issues
- Increased indexer speed by ~50x (async & timeout tuning, DB bottlenecks, scaling)
- Architected & implemented a system to react to safety events across Roblox (e.g. getting banned) by reindexing their creations to keep Creator Marketplace safe, coordinating 3 teams

### Founder @ eecs.courses
Jan 2020 – Jan 2021
Founded an online learning platform for Electrical Engineering and Computer Science courses

- Implemented backend and frontend using Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, GraphQL, React, Apollo, CSS Modules, and Heroku

- Deployed an adaptive bitrate video streaming solution via AWS Elemental Media Services, and HTTP Live Streaming

- Delivered a smooth user experience by devising a custom video player with thumbnail seeking in React

Update: due to time and money constraints, the service is temporarily paused

### Instructional Assistant for EECS280 (Programming & Intro Data Structures) @ University of Michigan College of Engineering
Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
- Created security, efficiency, and functionality patches to the Autograder (used by ~4600 students per semester across a dozen classes)

- Student well-being czar; Responsible for organizing roster and grade data to send weekly emails to ~1200 students to encourage them to stay on track

- Directed an asynchronous lab section for 33 students

- Published Claw, a CLI tool to assist staff in debugging student code during Office Hours quickly and accurately

### Instructional Assistant for ENGR100-960/970 (Intro to Engineering) @ University of Michigan College of Engineering
Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States
- Assisted in the development of ENGR100 Section 960, a new course at UofM for Fall 2020 with remote offering due to COVID-19

- Roles included web development for marketing to first year students, course syllabus planning, and lab development

### Instructional Assistant for ENGR100-950 (Intro to Engineering) @ University of Michigan College of Engineering
Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | Ann Arbor, Michigan
- Led lab sections of ~25 students, answering questions in class, holding office hours, and grading students

- Assisted in reworking portions of the course to be online-friendly for the COVID-19 University response

- Completed training provided by the Center for Research on Learning and Teaching at UofM. Attended ongoing professional development workshops

### Research Assistant @ University of Michigan College of Engineering
Jan 2019 – Jan 2020
- Worked under Professor Aaron Ridley of the Climate and Space Engineering Department to further the goals of Hands on Engineering,  a program made possible by a grant provided by the National Science Foundation

- Developed high quality video tutorials and lab manuals to expose students to advanced engineering concepts in various fields

- Investigated RFID protocol and developed a C library to drive an MFRC522 chip according to the ISO/IEC 14443 specification


## Education
### Bachelor of Science in Engineering (B.S.E.) in Computer Science
University of Michigan College of Engineering

### Syosset High School

### Pre-Collegiate Program in Artificial Intelligence
Stanford University

### High School Summer Program in Modern Technology and 3D Printing
New York Institute of Technology


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/neiljohari
- Portfolio: https://johari.tech/

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Source: https://flows.cv/neiljohari
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/neiljohari/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12