Akshaya Aradhya

CTO

Palo Alto, California, United States19 yrs 5 mos experience
AI EnabledAI ML Practitioner

Key Highlights

  • 15+ years in AI and ML leadership roles.
  • Scaled engineering teams for major tech companies.
  • Passionate about ethical AI and mentoring future leaders.
Stackforce AI infers this person is a FinTech and EdTech leader with extensive experience in AI and ML.

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Skills

Core Skills

Technology LeadershipSpeech RecognitionGenerative AiMachine LearningFraud DetectionRisk ManagementSearch And DiscoveryInfrastructure ManagementEngineering ManagementData Platform ManagementData ConnectivityConsultingDigital TransformationSoftware DevelopmentPayments

Other Skills

Agentic AI DevelopmentLarge Language Models (LLM)AI DevelopmentGenerative Adversarial Networks (GANs)Distributed ComputingBig DataUser Experience (UX)RAGSearch Engine Optimization (SEO)AI AgentDeep LearningRetail3D VisualizationAI Risk DecisioningBaaS

About

With 15+ years leading AI, ML, and large-scale distributed systems, I’ve built and scaled engineering orgs and platforms used by hundreds of millions of people worldwide. My work spans GitHub (Microsoft), Netflix, LiveRamp, Intuit, and most recently Oscilar - where I served as the VP of Engineering and scaled the company globally while building AI-first risk decisioning used by fintechs and financial institutions. At GitHub, I helped shape the technical foundation behind data services, search, storage, and core infrastructure supporting 150M+ developers - including components used by GitHub Copilot. At Netflix, I built ML and analytics platforms that powered real-time experimentation, content personalization, and petabyte-scale data processing. At LiveRamp, I led distributed engineering teams building data systems and identity infrastructure leveraged by major enterprises around the world. I’m now incredibly excited to join ELSA as Chief Technology Officer, where we are pushing the boundaries of speech recognition, pronunciation modeling, and generative AI to unlock confident communication for the 1.5 billion non-native English speakers around the globe. ELSA’s proprietary model stack - built for accent robustness, phoneme-level precision, and hyper-personalized learning - has already empowered 50M+ learners worldwide. We’re just getting started. Beyond building AI systems at scale, I’m passionate about ethical AI, broadening access to STEM, and mentoring the next generation of global builders. I care deeply about creating technologies and teams that measurably improve people’s lives.

Experience

19 yrs 5 mos
Total Experience
2 yrs 2 mos
Average Tenure
1 yr 5 mos
Current Experience

Elsa, corp

Chief Technology Officer

Jan 2025Present · 1 yr 5 mos · Palo Alto, California, United States · Remote

  • ELSA is the world’s most advanced conversational AI for English speaking - backed by Google and powered by proprietary speech-recognition and generative models trained specifically on non-native speaker data. Our models deliver phoneme-level precision, real-time corrective feedback, and hyper-personalized learning journeys that help 1.5 billion learners build confidence and unlock life-changing opportunities worldwide.
  • We are hiring for the following roles:
  • AI Engineer: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4380664506
  • ML/Speech Engineer: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4380662766
  • Product Designer: https://www.linkedin.com/jobs/view/4378491551
Technology LeadershipSpeech RecognitionAgentic AI DevelopmentLarge Language Models (LLM)

Oscilar

VP of Engineering

Jan 2024Jan 2025 · 1 yr · Palo Alto, California, United States · Hybrid

  • We had built an AI-first risk decisioning platform at Oscilar, revolutionizing how organizations detect and mitigate fraud in real-time. I led the teams across the stack, tackling some of the most complex challenges in real-time decisioning, risk management, and scalable architectures. We had leveraged cutting-edge technology to create intelligent, adaptable solutions that push the boundaries of what's possible in the industry. Our teams used Gen AI to tackle complex scenarios in Anti Money Laundering (AML), Account Take Over (ATO), KYC/KYB etc.
Generative AIFraud DetectionRisk ManagementAI Risk DecisioningBaaSPayments+2

Independent

Startup Advisor

Jan 2023Present · 3 yrs 5 mos · Palo Alto, California, United States · Remote

  • Provided strategic and technical guidance to a set of companies in the Healthcare, DevTools, Infrastructure and AdTech/MarTech space to drive success.
  • Provided technical due diligence services to help investors in US, UK and EU.
  • Collaborated with cross-functional teams to implement innovative Data, Infrastructure, ML/AI solutions for revenue growth.
  • Developed strong skills in AI strategy, startup advisory, and cross-functional collaboration.
  • D2 Advisor for SF ELC
Generative Adversarial Networks (GANs)Distributed ComputingBig DataUser Experience (UX)Generative AIMachine Learning+7

Github

Senior Director Of Engineering

Jan 2022Jan 2024 · 2 yrs · United States

  • I managed the organizations that handle the data services, infrastructure, search, storage, pipelines, data patterns, analytics and scaling at GitHub.
  • Our mission was to earn our customer's trust, approach our platforms as products and to be available everywhere. Our core systems were available in all of GitHub's major environments. Our platform prioritized reliability, scalability and security.
  • Our team of software engineers and SREs built tools and microservices to manage, scale and operate a fleet of data stores to enable self-service platforms for developers. We ensure the availability, performance and stability of object storage.
  • We cultivated the open source projects (Eg: gh-ost, freno, orchestrator etc.) and build things that we are proud to share. Lastly, we provided the platform and infrastructure that powers all of GitHub (including CoPilot AI).
Search and DiscoveryP&L ManagementInfrastructure as code (IaC)ML InfraGitHub CopilotGenerative AI+8

Netflix

Director Of Engineering

Jan 2020Jan 2022 · 2 yrs · Los Gatos, California, United States

  • The Data Platform team was responsible for providing the infrastructure supporting all data within Netflix, including the Big Data platform, operational data stores, data transport layers, and reporting solutions.
  • As Netflix’s business grew, the Data Platform had more and more data from multiple different origins available for our users to analyze. The Data Platform Edge org existed to be the front door for the users to find the data they needed. I managed the teams that built functionalities for the big data portal, APIs, tooling, ML Infrastructure, enterprise analytics, developer infrastructure and experience for Netflix engineering.
Cross-functional Team LeadershipEngineering ManagementSearch and DiscoveryP&L ManagementML InfraEnterprise Software+3

Liveramp

Director Of Engineering

Jan 2019Dec 2020 · 1 yr 11 mos · San Francisco, California, United States

  • Managed multiple geographically distributed software development teams in the Data Connectivity Group.
  • Experienced in the design, delivery, and operation of highly available, data-intensive applications. Adept in technologies such as Java, Spring, Javascript, HBase, Cassandra, Lucene, Solr, Redis, Kafka among others.
  • At LiveRamp, we are on a quest to build the most flexible and scalable data marketplace. The platform underlying the marketplace ingests, analyzes, enriches and transforms tens of petabytes of data and then delivers the enriched data to our customers. Powering it is a massive Hadoop cluster with over 80K cores and counting. The cluster hosts over 900 petabytes of data.
Cross-functional Team LeadershipEngineering ManagementP&L ManagementML InfraEnterprise SoftwareData Connectivity

Mckinsey & company

Senior Consultant

Jan 2018Jan 2019 · 1 yr · San Francisco, California, United States

  • My teams built new businesses, products, and experiences that redefined industries.
  • Worked with the world’s largest organizations to accelerate the impact of digital transformation.
  • Combined the best of McKinsey’s traditional strategic and analytical rigor with innovative rapid-prototyping capabilities to deliver digital transformations.
  • Helped global companies bring their business strategies to life quickly and efficiently.
Cross-functional Team LeadershipEngineering ManagementConsultingDigital Transformation

Intuit

Lead Software Development Engineer

Jan 2011Jan 2018 · 7 yrs · Mountain View, California, United States

  • Various roles during the career progression.
  • Early engineer for the Quickbooks payments team.
Cross-functional Team LeadershipEngineering ManagementEnterprise SoftwareSoftware DevelopmentPayments

Southern methodist university

Teaching and Research Assistant

Jan 2010Jan 2012 · 2 yrs · Dallas/Fort Worth Area

  • Student researcher at the Intelligent Data Analysis Group at SMU.
  • Worked on projects related to data mining, machine learning and recommender systems.

Independent consultant

Software Engineer

Jan 2009Jan 2010 · 1 yr · Dallas, Texas

  • Worked on full stack projects related to financial services.

Accenture

Senior Software Engineer

Jan 2007Jan 2009 · 2 yrs · Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

  • Built and scaled the billing and payments engine.

National aerospace laboratories

Software Development Intern

Jan 2007Jan 2007 · 0 mo · Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

  • Wrote the software for visualizing satellites in space

Education

The Wharton School

MBA

Jan 2019Jan 2021

Southern Methodist University

M.S. — Computer Science

Jan 2010Jan 2012

RV College Of Engineering

B.E. — Computer Science and Engineering

Jan 2003Jan 2007

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