VK

Varnit Khanna

Recursive Grep

Founder • 2025 - Present

Capital One

Director of Data Engineering, Small Business Card • 2018 - 2025

Engineering Leader overseeing the roadmap of 8 tech teams (˜50 engineers) within the Small Business Card (SBC) organization. My results impacted the entire journey of the SBC customer, which included customer acquisitions, account booking, web and mobile app servicing, real-time card transition processing, product rewards & benefits, agent servicing etc. In my tenure, I enabled my teams to successfully launch 4 brand new SBC products including Spark Cash Plus and Venture X Business which are the very first No-Preset Spending Limit Charge Cards launched by Capital One at scale.
– Led a portfolio of diverse technology projects and leveraged my deep experience in AI and Full-stack software development to create solutions that met our customer’s needs
– Collaborated with product leadership and partner platforms to deliver robust cloud native solutions that drives powerful experiences for Small Businesses
– Promoted a culture of engineering excellence and being well-managed, using opportunities to reuse and innersource solutions where possible

– Effectively communicated with and influence key stakeholders across the enterprise, at all levels of the organization
Technologies: Java, Spring Boot, Angular, Vue, Node.js, Python, Golang, Spark(EMR), Spark ML, ECS, Kafka, DynamoDB, Lambda, H20, Splunk

Tellius Inc.

Director of Engineering • 2017 - 2018

Responsible for strategic direction and bringing the company’s grand vision to life which secured Series A round of funding for the company.
– Design and develop cutting-edge solutions in the area of NLP and big data analytics, using existing and emerging technologies to deliver optimal data solutions for startups to enterprises
– Worked closely with the CEO and Head of Product to define and execute the backlog
– Mentored and coached to strengthen the technical expertise and know-how of the engineering, data science and product teams
– Hired and managed a distributed team of around 15 engineers and data scientists in India and Europe
Technologies: Java, Angular, Elixir, Spark, Clickhouse, Postgresql, Kubernetes, RabbitMQ, RASA, AWS, GCP

Cignifi Inc.

Head of Engineering & Product • 2015 - 2017

Responsible for the overall product and technology vision of the company. A key member of the executive team chartered with building a world-class machine learning and big data platform.
– Worked closely with the CEO and Chief Data Scientist to define the product vision for the company
– Created the platform architecture and drove change from the legacy systems to open source Spark/Hadoop ecosystem which enabled cloud and on-premise deployment
– Managed the team’s product backlog and day-to-day agile ceremonies to successfully delivered on multiple new product lines
– Led the team to follow industry best practices such as code reviews, automated testing and CI/CD
– Spearheaded agile process implementation in the organization to increase delivery velocity by more than 3 times
– Hired and managed a distributed team of around 10 engineers
Technologies: Java, Javascript, Spark(EMR), Hive(EMR), Presto(EMR), MySQL(RDS), Kafka, ElasticSearch, D3, React, MLlib

Tipbit Inc.

Backend Architect • 2013 - 2015

Responsible for building the core backend infrastructure from the ground up. Worked on cutting edge distributed systems and NLP technologies.
– Built a distributed fault tolerant email and document indexing system
– Enhanced documents discovery engine using NLP and machine learning algorithms
– Worked closely with product management to define backend platform roadmap
– Deployed application monitoring and alerting infrastructure using open source tools
– Hired and managed a distributed team of 4 backend engineers
Technologies: Erlang, C, Java, Pig, Riak Core, Hadoop(EMR), MySQL(RDS), ElasticSearch

Publication DB Inc.

Technical Co-Founder • 2012 - 2013

Worked on the whole product development life cycle from ideation and strategy to requirement specification to development and go-to-market strategy. Responsible for building the proof of concept from the ground up.
– Designed and developed scalable platform to ingest and organize scientific publications
– Acquired beta testing audience via social media marketing
– Managed product backlog and engaged with beta users to drive prioritization of product features
– Managed a teams of 3 engineers
Technologies: Erlang, Java, Javascript, Cassandra, ElasticSearch, Kafka

Synacor Inc.

Software Architect • 2010 - 2012

Created the technology vision for the company and drove change from a monolithic LAMP stack to decoupled micro-services architecture. Help modernize technology stack while delivering on a high growth roadmap
– Built a distributed content recommendation platform
– Built a display ads system that targeted users based on their activity
– Introduced continuous integration and scrum across development teams
– Worked closely with product management to define backend platform roadmap
– Hired and managed backend team of 5 engineers
Technologies: Java, PHP, Javascript, Pig, Riak, Cassandra, MySQL, Hadoop, Kafka

Yahoo! Inc.

Senior Software Engineer • 2007 - 2025

Delivered on multiple high scale web products including soccer world cup (> 40M users/month), Yahoo Latam front page (> 10M users/month), vertical social network (> 4M users/month).
– Built a globally distributed RESTful API to serve sports news, real-time scores and play-by-play
– Built frontend and backend for a browser based real-time group chat system
– Improved backend performance by profiling and implementing efficient caching strategy
– Effectively collaborated with geographically distributed teams to deliver projects on time
Technologies: Java, PHP, Perl, Erlang, Javascript, Actionscript, MySQL, Memcached, Squid, Ejabberd, YUI.

World Avenue LLC.

Lead Engineer • 2006 - 2007

– Built real-time ad reporting system on top of MySQL
– Created intranet tools to improve process and productivity of campaign managers
– Managed a team of 4 Engineers
Technologies: C, PHP, Javascript, MySQL.

BMV Corp.

Software Engineer • 2005 - 2006

– Built a scalable reporting platform on top of MySQL

Technologies: PHP, Javascript, MySQL.

Iowa State University

B.S. Computer Science • 2000 - 2004