Balaji Raghavan

CTO

Los Altos, California, United States21 yrs 11 mos experience

Highly Stable

Key Highlights

Led engineering teams for multiple verticals at Lyft.
Managed Gmail backend for a decade at Google.
Expert in marketplace optimizations and consumer apps.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS and Consumer Apps expert with strong leadership in engineering.

Contact

balaji.raghavan@postman.com LinkedIn

Skills

Core Skills

Executive Leadership

Other Skills

Consumer Appsdata infradistributed platformsmarketplace optimizationsrecommendationssearchstorage

About

Engineer-at-heart with a passion to build strong, high performing teams for delivering impact in products that are reshaping how people get things done. At Lyft, I was responsible for the Rideshare business' core marketplace and rider experiences. In addition, I led the Driver Earnings efforts as well as several other verticals including Mapping, Delivery, Transit and Machine Learning Platform. While at Google, I ran Gmail backend for 10 years with a small, focused team and led many projects to optimize storage, improve search as well as reduce network utilization. I was also responsible for building the common storage and search backend across Google Apps (and beyond) and drove its adoption (with some awesome leaders in my team) to 30+ projects including Google Drive, Calendar, Glass, etc. Expertise: Consumer Apps, marketplace optimizations, distributed platforms, data infra, storage, search, recommendations.

Experience

Postman

Head of Engineering

Apr 2025 – Present · 11 mos · San Francisco Bay Area · On-site

Uniphore

2 roles

Chief Evangelist and Innovation Officer (EVP)

Aug 2024 – Apr 2025 · 8 mos · Palo Alto, California, United States · On-site

Chief Technology Officer

Dec 2021 – Aug 2024 · 2 yrs 8 mos · Palo Alto, California, United States · On-site

Executive Leadership

Lyft

VP of Engineering

Mar 2017 – Aug 2021 · 4 yrs 5 mos · San Francisco, California

Led the engineering teams for Marketplace, Rider, Machine Learning, Mapping, Transit and Delivery.

Executive Leadership

Various startups

Advisor

Feb 2017 – Present · 9 yrs 1 mo · Remote

Finitepaths inc. (acq. by lyft)

Co-founder

Nov 2015 – Mar 2017 · 1 yr 4 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

We were on a mission to get contextual answers to your everyday questions from your friends, neighbors and topic experts.

Google

5 roles

Engineering Director

May 2013 – Nov 2015 · 2 yrs 6 mos

Responsible for Google Apps Backend (Gmail, Drive, Calendar, etc.) and Gmail Enterprise product.

Senior Staff Software Engineer

Promoted

Oct 2010 – Apr 2013 · 2 yrs 6 mos

Executive Leadership

Staff Software Engineer

Promoted

Apr 2009 – Sep 2010 · 1 yr 5 mos

Senior Software Engineer

Promoted

Jul 2007 – Mar 2009 · 1 yr 8 mos

Software Engineer

Jun 2004 – Jun 2007 · 3 yrs

After a short stint in Ads Billing, I became an early member of the Gmail backend team responsible for Storage, Search, Backups, scalability and reliability of Gmail through the next decade.