Neha Pawar

CEO

Mountain View, California, United States14 yrs 2 mos experience

Highly Stable

Key Highlights

Over a decade of experience in real-time analytics.
Key contributor to Apache Pinot's architectural evolution.
Passionate about scalable infrastructure solutions.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Data Engineering expert specializing in real-time analytics and distributed systems.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Big DataSoftware DevelopmentData EngineeringApache PinotTeam ManagementSystem Design

Other Skills

Iceberg MetadataBigQueryReal-time analyticsOLAP databasesData InfrastructureJavaApache KafkaReal-time ingestionKafkaQuery engineJSP/ServletsTIBCO EMSC++CUDAQt

About

I have over a decade of experience building high-performance, real-time analytics platforms at petabyte scale. Currently, I'm a Software Engineering Manager II at Google, working on Iceberg initiaitives for BigQuery. Previously, I led the Data Infra org at StarTree, advancing the state of real-time analytics with Apache Pinot—an OLAP database purpose-built for sub-second latency and massive concurrency. As a PMC member and top committer for Apache Pinot, I’ve helped shape its evolution—leading initiatives like ingestion transformations, tiered storage, and cluster observability. I'm passionate about solving infrastructure problems at scale and delivering performant, cost-efficient systems that power user-facing analytics in the real world. I enjoy speaking at conferences (QCon, Kafka Summit, Current, Data + AI Summit), mentoring new contributors, and writing about distributed systems, observability, and real-time data infra. My work has been featured in SIGMOD, O’Reilly, The New Stack, and engineering blogs. Always curious about what’s next in streaming, open source, and systems that don’t just scale—but shine under pressure.

Experience

14 yrs 2 mos

Total Experience

2 yrs 9 mos

Average Tenure

4 mos

Current Experience

Google

Software Engineering Manager

Jan 2026 – Present · 4 mos · Sunnyvale, California, United States · On-site

Iceberg Metadata for BigQuery

Iceberg MetadataBigQueryBig DataSoftware Development

Startree

3 roles

Head of Data Infra

Promoted

Feb 2024 – Jan 2026 · 1 yr 11 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

I lead the Data Infrastructure org at StarTree, managing a global team of 20+ engineers focused on making Apache Pinot the fastest, most robust and most cost-efficient platform for real-time analytics.
We own the entire lifecycle of data infrastructure in StarTree Cloud—from ingestion, indexing, and query execution to observability, enterprise readiness, and operational excellence. We support workloads with petabyte-scale data, hundreds of thousands of events/sec ingestion, and millisecond p99 latencies.

Apache PinotData InfrastructureReal-time analyticsData EngineeringTeam Management

Engineering Manager

Apr 2022 – Mar 2024 · 1 yr 11 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

Founding Engineer

Feb 2020 – Apr 2022 · 2 yrs 2 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

Joined StarTree as one of the founding engineers to build a cloud-native, fully managed offering for Apache Pinot—bringing real-time analytics to mission-critical, user-facing applications.
As part of the core team, I drove several foundational efforts across ingestion, storage, and query execution, helping StarTree establish a strong technical and market differentiation early on.

JavaApache PinotApache KafkaSoftware DevelopmentData Engineering

The apache software foundation

Apache Pinot PPMC and Committer

Mar 2019 – Present · 7 yrs 2 mos

https://pinot.apache.org/
I’m a Project Management Committee (PMC) member and longtime committer for Apache Pinot, a real-time distributed OLAP database that powers sub-second analytics at scale for companies like LinkedIn, Uber, Stripe, and Cisco.
In this role, I’ve contributed deeply across the project—leading key architectural efforts, mentoring new contributors, and helping shape Pinot’s long-term roadmap. My focus areas include ingestion, storage optimizations, query performance, and operational tooling.

Apache PinotReal-time analyticsOLAP databasesData Engineering

2 roles

Senior Software Engineer

Promoted

Jan 2017 – Feb 2020 · 3 yrs 1 mo

As part of the Pinot team, worked on several pieces such as 1) real-time ingestion - enhancing Kafka ingestion, and building a neat abstraction to support any real-time streaming source as a plug-in 2) query engine -designed and implemented ORDER BY functionality for Pinot 3) helped onboard, support and scale several LinkedIn teams using Pinot for real-time user-facing analytics use-cases

Real-time ingestionKafkaQuery engineData EngineeringSoftware Development

Software Engineer

Feb 2015 – Dec 2016 · 1 yr 10 mos

Working with the Data Analytics Infrastructure team, on a project for real-time business monitoring and anomaly detection.

Yahoo

Software Engineering Intern

May 2014 – Aug 2014 · 3 mos · Sunnyvale

Worked with the Yahoo Ads Manager Plus backend grid team in the Ads and Data group
Worked on the performance optimization of a Pig module by redesigning into Hive ORC
Enhanced space optimization of the grid by integrating Hadoop Archive (HAR) in the hadoop workflows
Increased test coverage for workflows using Pig Unit Simple

Tibco software

Software Engineer

Jul 2011 – May 2013 · 1 yr 10 mos · Pune

Designed a Global Referral Management System for using Java, JSP/ Servlets, TIBCO Active Matrix BPM, TIBCO EMS
Implemented a security framework using SAML protocol and X.509 in Java, using Open SAML libraries.

JavaJSP/ServletsTIBCO EMSSoftware DevelopmentSystem Design

Nvidia

Architecture Intern

Jun 2010 – May 2011 · 11 mos · Pune Area, India

Designed a Warp Event Trace Viewer to graphically represent utilization of warps (block of 32 threads) on a GPU, for applications which used CUDA architecture, using C++, CUDA-C, Qt library, thus providing useful information such as occupancy of the kernel, utilization of the thread blocks, performance bottlenecks

C++CUDAQtSoftware DevelopmentSystem Design