Nikhil Y.

Senior Software Engineer

Mountain View, California, United States8 yrs 10 mos experience
Highly StableAI Enabled

Key Highlights

  • Expert in natural language processing and search algorithms.
  • Proven track record in leading engineering teams.
  • Innovative solutions with patents in AI-driven query mapping.
Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS expert with strong capabilities in AI and search technologies.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Software InfrastructureSoftware DesignCore JavaMachine LearningCloud-native ApplicationsSearch AlgorithmsSoftware Development

Other Skills

Apache KafkaArtificial Intelligence (AI)Big DataC#C++Computer VisionData ScienceDistributed SystemsDocker ProductsElasticsearchEnterprise SoftwareGitHTMLKnowledge Graph-Based RecommendationKubernetes

About

I work as a Staff Software Engineer at ThoughtSpot with expertise in Java, C++, Python, C#, and MATLAB. I hold a Master's degree in Computer Science from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst with a specialization in AI and a Bachelor's degree in Computer Science and Engineering from Indian Institute of Technology Delhi (IIT-Delhi). My work experience includes designing and implementing metadata object models, leading teams for developing search algorithms & enriching our in-house query generation engine to be more expressive. Prior to this, I also worked at Barclays and Samsung R&D Institute India. With patents in mapping natural language to queries using a query grammar, I am skilled in Elasticsearch, Kubernetes, Apache Kafka, AWS S3, Lambda, Prometheus, and Jenkins.

Experience

Meta

Senior Software Engineer

Apr 2025Present · 11 mos · Sunnyvale, California, United States · On-site

  • Ads Infra

Thoughtspot

6 roles

Senior Staff Software Engineer

Feb 2025Apr 2025 · 2 mos

Software InfrastructureBig Data

Staff Software Engineer

Promoted

Jun 2023Feb 2025 · 1 yr 8 mos

  • Leading a team of 9 engineers across two time-zones spanning three core services within the company.
  • The team is responsible for development and maintenance of natural language search functionality in our analytics software.
  • Led the ideation and implementation of feedback (human in the loop) incorporation mechanism to improve accuracy of Natural Language Search (95% reported by customers) & ensure customers have full control over training their queries using the system. The feedback is multi-level and handles database queries, chart configurations, formula and join specifications of users enabling seamless personalization for all users in a cluster
  • Implemented adhoc formula & query on query generation using natural language where inference is made based on SQL from LLM to decide if we need to generate a formula to create the AI generated answer.
  • Led work on developing multi-level semantic cache to reduce costs & latency associated with API calls to LLM services.
  • Working with metadata teams to move single tenant services to multi-tenant as part of the firm's NorthStar architecture.
Software DesignPrompt EngineeringEnterprise SoftwareC++Knowledge Graph-Based RecommendationRecommender Systems+2

Senior Member Of Technical Staff

Feb 2022Jun 2023 · 1 yr 4 mos

  • Responsible for maintaining & optimizing metadata infra.
  • Reduced memory consumption of metadata service by 4x, bringing down java Xmx from 64GB to 16GB in production environments, reducing cloud costs for the firm.
  • Developed NL to DSL using a combination of LLMs & heuristics with an accuracy of 73% on worksheets with 1000s of columns.
  • Conceptualized & developed online human feedback sourcing & incorporation algorithm to improve NL to DSL translations. (Patent Pending)

Member of Technical Staff 4

Feb 2021Jan 2022 · 11 mos

Member of Technical Staff 3

Feb 2020Jan 2021 · 11 mos

Member Of Technical Staff 2

Feb 2019Jan 2020 · 11 mos

  • Part of the Search team at ThoughtSpot.
  • Responsible for developing search algorithms for performing queries on large datasets using natural language for data analysis.
  • One of the core engineers who built a multi-tenant scalable search system using Apache Kafka, Elasticsearch & Kubernetes, from concept to final implementation. Link: https://www.thoughtspot.com/product/search

Barclays investment bank

2 roles

Business Analyst

Promoted

Oct 2018Dec 2018 · 2 mos · Greater New York City Area

Natural Language Processing (NLP)Search Algorithms

Summer Analyst

Jun 2018Aug 2018 · 2 mos · Greater New York City Area

  • Worked on migrating legacy applications, setting up build environments, automated build process, developed applications to generate audit check reports, notifying credit event to stakeholders & modified replenishment logic based on new trades
  • Synchronized servers within avg. 7 µs accuracy (10% network load) using SVM hyperplane intercept as offset b/w servers
  • Developed an email classification plugin in C# to improve efficiency by reducing spam but allowing anomaly notification

University of massachusetts amherst

Graduate Researcher

Jan 2018May 2018 · 4 mos

  • Worked on solving word algebraic problems using Structured Prediction Energy Networks

Bobble keyboard

Research Engineer

Mar 2017Aug 2017 · 5 mos · New Delhi Area, India

  • Designed & built end to end system for contextual content suggestion including data collection & analysis, model training & parameter tuning, & running neural network algorithms on smartphones using C++ (Core) & Java (Android)
  • Achieved 139% increase in daily average content shares & 105% increase in average user sessions created in Bobble keyboard
  • Developed transliteration & word prediction algorithms using bidirectional LSTMs with attention & trigram models for Indic languages improving transliteration user accuracy from 69.89% to 76.96% & test accuracy from 59% to 74%
  • Reduced latency of image processing & neural network models on smartphones by over 7 times using C++/OpenGL

Samsung electronics

2 roles

Software Engineer

Jul 2015Dec 2016 · 1 yr 5 mos · Noida Area, India

  • Responsible for feature prototyping, code analysis, testing & optimization of settings & gallery modules in smartphones
  • Implemented a prototype for automatic categorization of images into documents, objects, landscapes, selfies & group photos in gallery application using an ensemble of pretrained image classification models

Software Engineering Intern

May 2014Jul 2014 · 2 mos · Bengaluru Area, India

  • Development of User Context Detection System using Smartphone Sensors

Education

Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi

Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) — Computer Science

Jan 2011Jan 2015

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Master of Science - MS — Computer Science

Jan 2017Jan 2018

Stackforce found 100+ more professionals with Software Infrastructure & Software Design

Explore similar profiles based on matching skills and experience