Prasanna R

Prasanna R is a Senior Architect at Flipkart, where they have worked since August 2015. Prasanna is currently on the founding team at Fi, a startup that is building a financial services platform for the next billion users.

At Flipkart, Prasanna has worked on Flipkart Plus, Recommendations & Search. Prasanna has designed and built multiple micro-services that power the product, and is currently working on building more product features and capabilities. Prasanna has also worked on scaling the backend data pipelines for the Recommendations Platform, and has improved and iterated on the ML algorithms.

In addition, Prasanna has built and scaled the streaming real-time ingestion pipeline for Flipkart's Real-time ingestion pipeline - Kafka, Storm, Redis, HBase, Solr. Prasanna has made significant contributions to Apache Storm (storm-kafka-client), and has achieved a 10x throughput improvement along with a >2x reduction in hardware compared to the previous generation. Prasanna has also implemented comprehensive production observability (logging, metrics & alerts), and has made the system robust & reliable with negligible impact of instance failures. Prasanna has also achieved a significant reduction in ingestion lag & errors.

Prasanna has also architected the custom next gen sharded search serving layer to handle more than 5x growth in index size. Prasanna developed & helped implement a comprehensive launch plan which included revamp of infra setup, automated build & deployment, debug tools, metric & alerts, etc. Using a data-driven approach, they convinced stakeholders across functions to remove/reduce data in the serving layer thereby achieving significant reduction in the capacity requirements of the search stack - indexing & serving. Prasanna drove the solution end-end to build systems/process for identifying non-critical data at the source, propagate it to all the consumers & remove such data from serving layer of search.

Finally, Prasanna kickstarted the long term architecture evolution and tech debt reduction by breaking up a monolithic service. Prasanna also mentored Developers and evangelized and drove adoption of SDLC best practices - Code review, Design review, Unit/Functional/Perf tests; Ops automation.

Prasanna R has a Master's in Systems Engineering from the University of Cincinnati and a Bachelor's in Electrical and Electronics Engineering from SSN College of Engineering, University of Madras.