# Srinivas balaji R

> catalog search engineer at rakuten

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/srinivasbalajir

## Work Experience
### Catalog Search Engineer (Software engineer) @ Ebates
Jan 2018 – Jan 2020 | San Francisco Bay Area
- Create and design data pipelines for enriching the product catalog
- Lead efforts to design and implement shelf space optimization of the product catalog at real time. This allowed fine-grained control over the contents of the product catalog in the
elastic search. Improved cache look up time by implementing sketching data structures.
- Experiment and evaluate product categorization using various machine learning models.
- Build tools to monitor and evaluate categorization performance
- Created visualizations and published metrics for different categorization models using Grafana, StatsD and Graphite.
- Supported efforts to create and onboard new revenue stream channels.
- Designed and created automated slack alert messages for the revenue stream pipeline integrated with grafana dashboards
- Designed a proof of concept based on word vector embeddings to create a related search recommendation engine
- Working on design / re-architecture of the machine learning pipelines
- Experiment and evaluate catalog attribute classification task using various machine learning models to set the ground up for guided / bubble search based user experience.

### Software Engineer, Data Platforms @ Reflektion
Jan 2017 – Jan 2018 | San Mateo County, California, United States
- Create API’s to serve requests for the Co-viewed, Co-bought and Top-K results (based on the dimensions).
- Designed , tested and deployed data pipelines for real time feed ingestion that powers everything from the machine learning
models to grafana dashboards.
- Build Flink jobs to do realtime extract, transform and load operation for data consumption by the downstream systems - Created ansible scripts for seamless deployment using Jenkins.
- Profiled the JAVA application for memory leaks and optimized the API’s for better throughput

### Big Data Engineer @ American Express
Jan 2015 – Jan 2017 | New York, United States
- Build applications using various big data technologies like hadoop, hive, HBase and SOLR.
- Create and apply algorithmic patches/fixes for both real-time and batch components of the AMEX real-time offer and merchant Recommendation platforms.
- Designed a real time shopsmall merchant typeahead, name and keyword search for both secure and non-secure user experience.
- Implemented a peer scoring feature for the real time component of the collaborative filtering algorithm to remedy the cold-start problem.
- Created ETL’s for the batch component of the US merchant scoring application.
- Build control cell logic to assign scores to the merchants based on popularity and random scoring algorithms.
- Automated interest, commerce and preference graph computations. Designed a python script to extract data from cornerstone 2.0 repository using a headless browser.
- Redesigned the similarity matrix to incorporate algorithmic enhancements
- Designed RESTful web applications for shopsmall maps migration and built a location aware search functionality for the maps.
- Created scripts to automate the process of continuous deployment in the developer environment with the goal to improve developer experience in the team.
- As a part portfolio engineering group within the Digital Offer Ecosystems team (DOE) brought in a few of the best programming Practices within the US scoring team.
- Worked on designing data pipelines handling multiple TB’s of data for the personalization and LET re-engineering datasets.
- Designed JMeter performance testing scripts for stress testing to identify possible code/JVM parameter optimizations in the JAVA applications. Wrote scripts to scan through GC logs and aggregate statistics to identify performance bottlenecks.


## Education
### Master's degree in Computer Engineering
University of Florida


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/srinivas-balaji-r-abba06169

---
Source: https://flows.cv/srinivasbalajir
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/srinivasbalajir/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-29