# Urvish Desai

> Senior Software Engineer at TikTok | Ex-Oracle | NYU Courant | IIT Dhanbad

Location: United States, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/urvish

I build high-performance, scalable data infrastructure at the intersection of databases, distributed systems, and ML/AI. My work focuses on query engines, data platforms, and ML infrastructure that power search, analytics, and model training/inference workloads at scale.

I’m currently a Senior Software Engineer at TikTok, where I lead and contribute to the Bolt (Velox) database acceleration engine, ElasticSearch Analytical Processing (ESAP), and low-latency, multi-tenant query execution across large production clusters. My work spans engine integration (C++/Java/JNI), memory layout and zero-copy optimizations, operator-level query optimizations, performance tuning, and distributed systems—driving significant gains in throughput, P99 latency, and platform reliability. I’ve also built ML-adjacent data systems, including RAG-based tooling and distributed compute frameworks that bridge ETL, feature engineering, and ML workflows.

Previously, I worked at Oracle in the Database Recovery & High Availability group, building core recovery and streaming I/O infrastructure for the first NVRAM-based, cloud-optimized database engine, with a focus on durability, fault tolerance, and correctness.

I hold an M.S. in Computer Science from NYU Courant (GPA 3.95) and a dual degree (B.Tech + M.Tech) in Mathematics & Computing from IIT Dhanbad. My interests include distributed data systems, search and analytics infrastructure, ML/GenAI platforms, and intelligent automation. I enjoy contributing to open source and building next-gen data and ML platforms.

## Work Experience
### Senior Software Engineer @ TikTok
Jan 2023 – Present | San Jose, California, United States
Data Platform - Data Architecture - Compute Platform - DB Acceleration Engine

### Member Of Technical Staff @ Oracle
Jan 2020 – Jan 2023 | Redwood City, California, United States
Database Recovery - Backup & Restore - Log Archiving - Shared Storage

### Graduate Teaching Assistant @ New York University
Jan 2019 – Jan 2020 | New York, New York, United States
Statistical Natural Language Processing

### Machine Learning Engineer Intern @ Amazon
Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Greater Seattle Area
-	Designed and deployed a stand-alone Machine Learning framework in Python for automated root-cause categorization of workflow failures for the ‘Jupyter Notebooks as a Service’ team in Amazon Cloud Machine Learning Platform (AWS Sagemaker)
-	Developed a Dataset management system integrated with the classifier on AWS S3 cloud supporting version management control for continuous update of training data, making it scalable, fault-tolerant, cost effective, and easy to manage & use
-	Lead the design and development workflow (Agile Scrum) of the entire framework by making the first cross-disciplinary effort facilitating Machine Learning solutions in the internal operations repo on a distributed computing environment (AWS EC2)
-	Built CLI scripting tools for retrieval & updating of data, training of classifier & region-based statistics report generation; added 5 different classification models to the classifier giving top 2 root causes with probability scores showing 91% accuracy
-	Performed end-to-end unit testing and integration testing using Pytest; and code reviews using Amazon CRUX tool

### Graduate Teaching Assistant @ New York University
Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | Greater New York City Area
Natural Language Processing (Ralph Grishman)

### Academic Tutor @ New York University
Jan 2018 – Jan 2019 | New York, New York
Intro to Programming

### Academic Tutor @ New York University
Jan 2018 – Jan 2018 | New York, New York
Basic Algorithms

### Research Engineer Intern @ Indian Institute of Science (IISc)
Jan 2017 – Jan 2017 | Bangalore
-	Devised a novel algorithm for synthesis of articulatory MRI videos (vocal tract) for any given word based on Dynamic programming with intensive image / video processing for boundary stitching and interpolation of video frame sequences
-	Performed development in MATLAB with modularization using the Image Processing Toolbox, Matplotlib and other libraries for superimposition, vectorization, correction of image orientation & resolution, audio sampling, and frame matching
-	Obtained phonetic transcriptions of audio by forced alignment using Kaldi Speech Recognition toolkit (Deep Neural Networks)
-	Developed a MATLAB GUI application for testing and subjective evaluation of resulting videos gaining an overall score of 3.78/5


## Education
### Master of Science - MS in Computer Science
New York University

### Integrated M.Tech in Mathematics and Computing
Indian Institute of Technology (Indian School of Mines), Dhanbad

### Undergraduate Mobility Scholar in Informatics and Computing
Faculdade de Engenharia da Universidade do Porto


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/urvishdesai95
- Portfolio: https://scholar.google.com/citations?user=XJyGtOEAAAAJ&hl=en

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