Rakesh Neelavar Rao

Rakesh Neelavar Rao is a seasoned data professional with extensive experience in data engineering and analytics across various companies. Currently serving as a Senior Data Platform Engineer at Thumbtack since December 2020, Rakesh has previously held key roles at ipsy and Lumos Labs, where significant contributions included building Kafka ETL pipelines and data migration to advanced platforms like Braze. As a Principal Engineer at Quaero, Rakesh led the development of a Customer Data Platform and was instrumental in a major cloud migration to AWS. Early career experiences include roles at Tresata, UNC Charlotte, Infosys, and Cisco Systems, focusing on data management, software development, and database design. Rakesh holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from the University of North Carolina at Charlotte and a Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science from the National Institute of Engineering, Mysore.