# Vignesh Raja > Senior Software Engineer at Reddit Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States Profile: https://flows.cv/vigneshraja Specialties: Programming, Research, Mathematics, and Writing Interests: Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Distributed Systems Interested in early to mid-stage companies with unique technical challenges as well as strong product/market fit. Personal Website: vigneshraja.io ## Work Experience ### Senior Software Engineer @ Reddit, Inc. Jan 2019 – Present | San Francisco Bay Area Backend engineering on the Anti-Evil team to improve Reddit's safety ### Senior Software Engineer @ Optimizely Jan 2016 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area • As a member of the distributed systems team, shipped multiple features to expand Optimizely’s analytics product. I worked on a realtime data pipeline processing billions of events daily and a tech stack comprised of Dropwizard, Flume, Kafka, Samza, and HBase fully hosted on AWS. • Led project to improve the observability of Optimizely’s results query path by introducing centralized logging using Fluentd, Chef, S3, and Elasticsearch+Kibana. • Delivered GDPR compliance for the distributed systems team on a strict deadline. Wrote several MapReduce jobs to access/delete visitor data from HBase and S3. • Member of the core 4-person engineering team that launched the Optimizely X Full Stack and Mobile products (https://www.optimizely.com/products/full-stack), which grew to $10M+ ARR within a year. • Led development of the Optimizely Java SDK (https://github.com/optimizely/java-sdk) building features including audience targeting, mutually exclusive experiments, live variables, whitelisting, and webhooks while working across tech stacks building models/APIs in a Python web-app environment (Google App Engine) and a few React JS frontend components. • Gave onboarding talks to new engineers about our data infrastructure • Conducted onsite and phone interviews for engineering candidates on areas such as CS fundamentals and system design. • Participated in on-call operations for the data infrastructure backing the realtime analytics product. ### Software Engineering Intern @ Optimizely Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 • Scoped out Google AdWords integration which allows for targeting based on AdWords referral data (https://help.optimizely.com/Integrate_Other_Platforms/Integrating_Optimizely_with_Google_AdWords) • Built generalized method of quickly adding OAuth-enabled Optimizely integrations • Prototyped Optimizely Apps for hackathon project (https://help.optimizely.com/Integrate_Other_Platforms/Introduction_to_Optimizely_Apps) ### Machine Learning (CS 446) Grader @ University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 ### Software Development Intern @ salesforce.com Jan 2014 – Jan 2014 • Built OAuth & RBAC protected, versioned REST APIs to manage OAuth clients who use the Salesforce Data.com API. OAuth admins can use the API to generate, delete, update, and search for clients. Used Spring Framework. • Developed a frontend in AngularJS for OAuth client management APIs. • For a company hackathon, built a REST API that generates an ideal customer profile with Weka, then makes calls to the Data.com Connect API to get contacts that fit the constraints from the profile. Customers similar to ideal profile are visualized on a heat map of the United States. Used Java for training, Scala for API layer, AngularJS for frontend. Worked in team of 4. ### Software Engineering Intern @ EMC Jan 2013 – Jan 2013 | Irvine, California • Wrote Bash scripts to auto-configure centralized logging (rsyslog) on various nodes of the vCloud (RabbitMQ server, PostgreSQL server, VMware vFabric tc server instances). Wrote Puppet modules to run these scripts on VM deployment to improve consumer usability. • Wrote a Java application to consume JSON vCloud backup status messages from a RabbitMQ server queue and send email notifications to vCloud administrators on backup failures. Used Spring Framework AMQP, RabbitMQ API, VMware vCloud SDK, and Maven. • Wrote a Java application to consume XML messages from a RabbitMQ server queue and write the parsed messages into a PostgreSQL database. Based on different XML message schemas, database table elements are modified accordingly. Used Spring Framework AMQP/JDBC, RabbitMQ API, and Maven. • Prepared demos of these applications for senior engineers. Wrote significant part of the product messaging specification. Code will be shipped with product. ### Software Engineering Intern @ EMC Jan 2012 – Jan 2012 | Irvine, California VMware Virtualization Backup Recovery Systems Group • Deployed ESX hypervisor clusters backed by SAN storage arrays in an enterprise datacenter. Configured these clusters using VMware vSphere client. • Installed and managed multiple vCenters. Also set up associated SQL databases and Active Directories • Setup a fully functional VMware vCloud backed by an Oracle database and implemented 2 vCloud Directors to manage this vCloud. • Deployed EMC Avamar and Data Domain virtual backup appliances for the same testbed. • Conducted a training presentation on installing the Avamar Virtual Edition for a large group, consisting of software engineers and EMC senior managers. • Used the VMware vSphere SDK to work on a JAVA program automating vCenter VM backups. ### Research Intern @ UCLA Center for Embedded Networked Sensing Jan 2009 – Jan 2010 | Westwood, California For two consecutive summers, I interned at CENS. The projects I worked on are detailed below. Summer of 2010 - Phrenic Sound: Developed an application that aims to establish a correlation between sound and mental capabilities (reaction time and memory) Summer of 2009 - WaterBusters: Developed an application that targets water wastage in Los Angeles through the implementation of participatory sensing and the Android operating system. ## Education ### Master of Computer Science University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 ### B.S in Computer Science University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Jan 2011 – Jan 2015 ### Gretchen Whitney High School Jan 2005 – Jan 2011 ## Contact & Social - LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/vignesh-raja-62622021 --- Source: https://flows.cv/vigneshraja JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/vigneshraja/resume.json Last updated: 2026-03-22