Bikas K.

Software Engineer

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India17 yrs 8 mos experience

Most Likely To SwitchAI ML Practitioner

Key Highlights

Over a decade of experience in search and information retrieval.
Expertise in building fast and explainable search systems.
Hands-on experience with multiple programming languages and databases.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a seasoned expert in Search and Information Retrieval technologies.

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Skills

Core Skills

Machine LearningElasticsearchSolrJava

Other Skills

Apache KafkaNode.jsPython (Programming Language)rayspaCySpring BootApache SparkCassandralivyGenerative AILarge Language Models (LLM)HTMLSQLJavaScriptJSP

About

I build search systems that are fast, accurate, and explainable enough to trust. I have spent a decade in search/information retrieval space, improving relevance and discovery using Solr, Elasticsearch, ML/NLP, Knowledge Graphs and Generative AI, backed by 13+ years building distributed systems across ecommerce, tech, and retail. Lately, a big part of my work is making search and Q&A less keyword-bound by grounding it in an Enterprise Knowledge Graph: graph modeling, ingestion pipelines, and query design on graph databases like TigerGraph, Arango DB, Neo4j, powering graph-based retrieval, reasoning, and Graph-RAG experiences. Hands-on with Java, Python, Node.js, and relational/NoSQL databases. 🔗 GitHub: https://github.com/bkatwal 🔗 Stack Overflow: https://stackoverflow.com/users/3903366/bikas-katwal 🔗 Medium: https://bikas-katwal.medium.com

Experience

17 yrs 8 mos

Total Experience

2 yrs 6 mos

Average Tenure

3 yrs 2 mos

Current Experience

Apple

2 roles

Staff Engineer (ICT5) - Applied Machine Learning

Promoted

Oct 2025 – Present · 7 mos · Hybrid

Senior Search Engineer (ICT4) - Applied Machine Learning

Mar 2023 – Oct 2025 · 2 yrs 7 mos · Hybrid

Postman

2 roles

Staff Engineer

Apr 2022 – Mar 2023 · 11 mos

Helped design and implement the API observability project.

Technical Lead

Mar 2021 – Mar 2022 · 1 yr

⇨ Built Query Understanding Service to improve search relevance
ML model to support federated search
Rule-based NER to identify organisation names in the query using Spacy
Other rule-based checks to identify request URLs in the query
⇨ Changed ES schema to improve the relevance.
⇨ Helped with the design and bootstrapping of Spell Correction work.
⇨ Improve code quality and search service reliability.
Circuit breaker for external services
Sonarqube integration
⇨ Helped and was actively involved in the design and implementation of the real-time pipeline to index data into Elasticsearch.

Apache KafkaMachine LearningNode.jsPython (Programming Language)rayspaCy+1

Walmart global tech india

2 roles

Engineer IV

Jan 2020 – Mar 2021 · 1 yr 2 mos

Engineer III

Apr 2018 – Dec 2019 · 1 yr 8 mos

⇨ Architected the migration of the whole search platform from the legacy search engine
(Endeca) to an open-source search engine (Solr).
Designed and Implemented the real-time and batch indexing pipeline.
Implemented the new Content Management Microservice

Spring BootApache KafkaSolrJavaApache SparkCassandra+1