Karan Handa

Karan Handa is a Senior Backend Engineer at Labelbox. Karan has been with the company since October 2019 and has been instrumental in building a robust and scalable platform to support the best products for advancing Artificial Intelligence.

Prior to Labelbox, Karan was with another company in a similar role. There, they shaped the tech stack for building the next-gen backend infrastructure to strike a balance between feature-shipping velocity and technical debt. Karan also designed, implemented and documented the baseline infrastructure and tools for the new tech stack to enable new engineers to ramp up quickly and start contributing in less than 1 week. In addition, they designed and maintained the GRPC-based API for the internal “Northstar” platform based on the new forward-looking domain model.

At Labelbox, Karan has continued their work in optimizing backend infrastructure. Karan has optimized the CDC-replication pipeline by a factor of 150+%. Karan also provides guidance to engineers with architecture and code reviews during the development of new features and services. In addition, they collaborate with management and other technical leads to set the team’s OKRs for every development cycle (lasting 8-12 weeks).

Karan is also responsible for hiring and team-building for the backend engineering team. Karan has defined the responsibilities for backend engineers at each level (mid-level, senior and staff) and used these responsibilities to create “hiring scorecards” that define

Karan Handa pursued a Master of Science in Electrical and Computer Engineering from Carnegie Mellon University. Karan also holds a B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from the Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology. In addition, they have completed a Certificate in Entrepreneurship Essentials from Harvard Business School Online and a Certificate in Financial Accounting from Harvard Business School Online. Karan is also Triplebyte certified Generalist Software Engineer and has a certification from MIT Professional Education in Machine Learning: From Data to Decisions.

Some of their coworkers include Nick Roberts - Software Engineer, Greg Szpak - Backend Engineer, and Ryan Quinn - Senior Software Engineer. Karan Handa reports to Keshav Sahoo, VP, Engineering.