# Pooja Rajkumar > Software Development Engineer II at Amazon | Public Speaker Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/poojarajkumar I like to build things. Check out my Github: https://github.com/Pooja-Rajkumar I spoke at the international useR! conference at Stanford University as well as the Modern Massive Data Sets conference at UC Berkeley about a passion project I worked on with my mentor and professor, Norman Matloff. You can access my talk here: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/useR-international-R-User-conference/useR2016/Rectools-An-Advanced-Recommender-System While I am an engineer, I am also passionate about writing and performing spoken word poetry, practicing ballet, and writing articles about my experiences in the Silicon Valley. My artistic pleasures have allowed me to implement creative ideologies in everything I do- from the way I live to the way I develop new, creative ideas and alternatives to back-end and front-end programming. I am passionate about women's rights and advancement in technology- and I am always looking for new opportunities that help bridge the gender gap in computer science. Hackathons: CalHacks 2016 Hack Davis 2017 ## Work Experience ### Software Development Engineer II @ Amazon Jan 2020 – Present | Seattle, Washington, United States ### Full Stack Engineer @ AppDirect Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco, California, United States Cost Descriptions- Wrote Java APIs that return critical cost description information per product. Descriptions were displayed for thousands of AppDirect customers. Discounts- Created pop ups using React framework to alert users when a discount is applied to an item in their cart. Aided in the development, design, and vision of alert display. Cart Validations- Developed alerts and modals to display validation errors when a shopping cart is not valid. Made robust API calls to determine item eligibility and built a mobile responsive modal for our internal company library utilizing CSS and the styled components framework. Established Women of AppDirect, a company-wide, international club dedicated to bringing the women and non-binary folk of AppDirect together to develop community and foster connection. ### Software Engineer @ GE Digital Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | San Ramon, California, United States Wrote a Go package that meters usage for one of our services by recursing through an n-ary tree and then sends usage through internal REST Api calls to pricing team. Used Spring Boot (Java) framework to write integration tests for a metering filter to test mock usage. Developed Jenkinsfiles to automate the deployment process of several services across multiple environments. Took on the role of Technical Project Manager for my team by leading retrospectives, sprint plannings, and by maintaining our team rally board. ### Data Science Research Assistant @ UC Davis Jan 2015 – Jan 2018 | Davis, CA Developed a project titled rectools- a recommender system package that incorporates covariates in consumer predictions. Utilized a latent factor model to predict specific user ratings, as well as leveraging method of moments, maximum likelihood, and nearest neighbor predictions. Rectools is 13% more accurate that the leading tool (recosystem) and takes 1/10 of the time. Details about results can be found at: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/useR-international-R-User-conference/useR2016/Rectools-An-Advanced-Recommender-System Also includes recosystem (non-negative matrix factorization package in R) but parallelized. All functions are parallelized. ### Undergraduate Research Assistant @ UC Davis Jan 2015 – Jan 2016 | Professor Debra Long Use software to analyze texts for probabilistic information about semantics and grammar. Focus on prediction in language processing by parsing data and merging results with the UCD database. Predict language processing and textual analysis through lexicalized PCFG software. ### Software Engineering Intern @ Cisco Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 Developed a predictive model in R that determines if a conference room is in use or not based on random forest boostraping machine learning methods. Converted this into Python in order to stream live data. Built an iOS app that communicated with building lights connected on the network through middleware. Individually designed, planned and developed the app from scratch using Swift. Created another predictive model to predict wifi bandwidth usage at national Cisco locations. ### Research Presenter @ Stanford University Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | useR! World Conference Presented my research at Stanford University at the useR! international Conference in June. You can access my talk here: https://channel9.msdn.com/Events/useR-international-R-User-conference/useR2016/Rectools-An-Advanced-Recommender-System ### Research Presenter @ UC Berkeley Jan 2016 – Jan 2016 | Modern Massive Data Sets Conference Presented my research at UC Berkeley at their Modern Massive Data Sets Conference in June. Learn more about it here: http://mmds-data.org/ ### Software Engineering Intern @ Cisco Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | San Jose Developed eValet (specs under Projects). Presented project to Senior Vice President John Manville on September 10, 2015. ### Technical Quality Intern @ Bay Area Techworkers Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 | San Ramon Conducted testing for potential candidates in Java and UI Served as a test evaluator and developed my own template for grading code based on functionality, readability, pseudo code, and algorithm Replaced current PMO and undertook all responsibilities for scheduling, networking, and calling. ## Education ### Bachelor of Science (B.S.) in Computer Science, minor in Technology Management University of California, Davis Jan 2013 – Jan 2017 ### Dougherty Valley High School Jan 2010 – Jan 2013 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/pooja-rajkumar-99928194 --- Source: https://flows.cv/poojarajkumar JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/poojarajkumar/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22