# Sitaram Iyer > Glean Engineer | Voice Agents | ex-Google Distinguished Eng Location: Oakland, California, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/sitaram Distinguished Software Engineer renowned for developing scalable, low-latency, mission-critical web and knowledge graph indexing infrastructure. Spearheaded initiatives that aid underprivileged communities with job search, education, financial wellness, and social justice. Skilled at cross-organizational collaboration while navigating complex stakeholder environments leading to innovative and impactful solutions. Leveraging AI to launch an AI education website (aitrends.live) and business contract analysis tools (samvid.ai). 𝐍𝐨𝐭𝐚𝐛𝐥𝐞 𝐀𝐜𝐡𝐢𝐞𝐯𝐞𝐦𝐞𝐧𝐭𝐬 ➢ Two generations of Google’s web search indexing system, resulting in a 2x fresher 1 trillion web page index and a platform for 1000s of internal developers, maintaining Google’s lead in Search ➢ Google’s Knowledge Graph indexing system, leading to fresh, varied composition of facts for Knowledge Panels ➢ Google’s Job Search, with 30M monthly active job seekers and 10x greater job postings and salary transparency ➢ Google’s College Search platform guiding 50 million underprivileged students to optimize their education choices ➢ Google’s Big Moments, for deeper context on 1000s of News events worldwide, with AI-orchestrated chatrooms ➢ AI Trends (aitrends.live), a site built using and powered by AI to teach AI with 5k page views and 600 users ➢ Samvid.AI (samvid.ai), enabling a high-quality chat over business contracts with embedded structured data 𝐂𝐨𝐫𝐞 𝐂𝐨𝐦𝐩𝐞𝐭𝐞𝐧𝐜𝐢𝐞𝐬 ➢ Large-Scale Infrastructure ➢ Search Strategy ➢ Search Crawl / Indexing ➢ Applied AI ➢ Large Language Models ➢ Knowledge Graphs ➢ Cross-org Collaborations ➢ Product Vision ➢ System Design ➢ Social Impact Search ➢ Job Search ➢ Education Search ➢ Retail Search ➢ Legal Search ➢ Distributed Systems ➢ Search Engine Optimization (SEO) ## Work Experience ### Software Engineer @ Glean Jan 2024 – Present | Palo Alto, California, United States Exploring Glean's mission of "Work AI for all" to make all workplace knowledge accessible and actionable. * Realtime Voice Assistant * PyAgents infrastructure overhaul * "Glean where you are" browser extension * few more projects ### Search Social Impact - Distinguished Engineer (L9) @ Google Jan 2014 – Jan 2023 Pursued different missions to help underprivileged and marginalized groups through job search, education, financial wellness, and social justice. Navigated stakeholders, policy and legal challenges, and external partners, creating space for teams (2 to 5 directs, total 5 to 15) to build effective and compassionate products. See my resume in profile > contact info > website for Google blog posts. Projects:  • Big Moments (2020 - 2023): Led a team to create Search features to provide deeper context for news stories on Google such as the Ukraine war and the Oscars and other sensitive/popular moments such as protests, celebrity deaths, mass shootings, and media/sport events. We show “lives affected” from Reuters for the scale of a war or mass shooting, live images from Getty for an on-the-ground view, in-depth news explainers for the Roe v Wade overturn and others, “How to help” to donate to the Ukraine refugee crisis, human voices from social media for context on incidents like the Will Smith slap, podcasts, and award nominees and winners for the Oscars.  • Financial Wellness (2020): Advised teams to help with unemployment benefits especially for job seekers during the pandemic. Created features that improved financial literacy.  • College Search (2017 - 2019): Led a team to launch Search features for college name and list queries, to help underprivileged students make informed college choices by 1) avoiding predatory schools, 2) recognizing lower-cost options, 3) understanding ROI, 4) choosing programs aligned with their career goals, 5) seeing student life and if they will fit in, and 6) getting notified about financial aid.  • Job Search (2015 - 2017): Led a team to launch a job search feature for queries like “accountant jobs near me”, by collaborating with major job boards and aggregators to enable the user to search for and filter jobs to identify relevant ones, understand estimated salaries and benefits, look for remote work, and be notified of new jobs. ### Search Infrastructure - Member of Tech Staff (L4) to Distinguished Engineer (L9) @ Google Jan 2003 – Jan 2014 Led search infrastructure projects such as web and knowledge graph indexing, building large, fast, and complex systems directly in data centers before the advent of Cloud technologies. Projects: • Foundation (2014 - 2015): Worked on unifying all of Google’s Search infrastructure including private/public, structured/unstructured, crawl/indexing/serving systems into a single “database of everything” and shared business logic with modular APIs and microservices. • Livegraph (2012 - 2013): Built the incremental indexer for the Knowledge Graph, with low-latency reconciliation and composition. This powers Knowledge Panels and many other Search features. • Alexandria (aka Caffeine) (2007 - 2013): Led the team to build the incremental indexer for Web Search that scaled to 1T web pages, averaged 1 min latency, and reduced staleness by 50%. It was built on a 250 PB Percolator based transactional data store running on 15,000+ machines, and had innovative techniques to handle diverse content types, redirects, duplicates, hyperlinks, pagerank, webmaster errors, and hacked sites. • Indexing pipeline (2005 - 2010): Built a batch indexing pipeline that scaled to 200B web pages with 36-hour latency, implementing a virtual segmented 10 PB repository that was needed to ingest a continuous crawl. • Index scaling (2003 - 2005): Scaled the index from 350M to 8B web pages, doubling index size over 3 weeks on the eve of Microsoft’s 5B index launch (Press: "Microsoft launches the world's biggest index, second only to Google"). ### Intern @ Microsoft Research Jan 2001 – Jan 2001 | Cambridge, England, United Kingdom Publication: Squirrel: A decentralized peer-to-peer web cache. Sitaram Iyer, Ant Rowstron, Peter Druschel. Published in the Symposium on the Principles of Distributed Computing (PODC), July 2002, Monterey, CA. ## Education ### Doctor of Philosophy - PhD in Operating systems Rice University ### Master of Science in Computer Science Rice University ### B. Tech in Computer Science and Engineering Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay ### Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/sitaram-iyer - Portfolio: https://tinyurl.com/resume-sitaram-iyer --- Source: https://flows.cv/sitaram JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/sitaram/resume.json Last updated: 2026-04-11