Rishikesh Mohanty

Senior backend engineer with 10 years of experience specializing in Java backend development, distributed systems, and big data platforms. Strong background in designing and operating large-scale data pipelines, microservices, and cloud-native systems. Extensive experience with Apache Spark, Kafka, Hive, Kubernetes, and cloud PaaS offerings, currently working on Azure Fabric and HDInsight at Microsoft.

Proven track record of operating at Senior+ / early Staff scope with ownership of complex systems and cross-team impact.

Software Engineer II at Microsoft R&D India - Azure (2020-01 – Present)

• Agentic AI Leadership (Fabric Materialized Lake Views): Recognized as an expert in agentic development; proactively drove architecture, demos, and adoption. Delivered the first complete end-to-end agentic feature to production in record timelines (concept -> demo -> GA). Enabled massive adoption by embedding autonomous planning, execution, validation, and recovery.
• Azure Fabric AI Shortcut Transforms: Owned pipelines to mirror unstructured text data into Delta tables, integrating Azure Cognitive Services & OpenAI for summarization, sentiment analysis, and translation.
• Fabric Materialized Lake Views / Spark SQL Engineering: Engineered end-to-end query planning and extended the Catalyst optimizer to support incremental view maintenance(refresh). Tuned complex analytical workloads for 1 TB+ datasets using Scala and Java, ensuring high throughput. Achieved a 90% reduction in data refresh latency compared to full recomputations.
• Cluster Autoscaling: Built and enhanced autoscaling platforms for Spark and LLAP workloads, improving elasticity and cost efficiency.
• Hive Warehouse Connector: Designed and developed connector for Spark (batch + structured streaming) with Spark Datasource V2 support and 3.x upgrade.
• Kubernetes & Security: Led efforts to containerize open-source big data stacks on AKS using CRDs. Built shared security libraries for HDInsight clusters enabling Azure AD-based authentication.
• Apache Hive Core: Diagnosed and fixed backend issues in production-scale clusters.

Software Engineer at Reliance Jio InfoComm Ltd. (2018-01 – 2020-12)

• Transaction Processing Engine: Core contributor to a generic platform handling transactions across travel, utilities, banking, and mutual funds.
• Unified Transaction History: Designed and implemented Spark batch & structured streaming jobs to consolidate data from multiple services into a unified history.
• Data Ingestion Pipelines: Built Kafka-based ingestion pipelines, crawlers, and data normalization services mapping heterogeneous schemas into a single data model.
• High-Performance Caching: Implemented caching layers using Redis and Apache Ignite.
• Security Libraries: Developed generic security libraries for banking services including device binding and certificate-based authentication.
• Merchant Payments: Automated merchant payment platforms including eNach and eMandates.

Software Engineer at Dell Technologies (2016-01 – 2018-12)

• Test Automation Platforms: Developed backend services to manage test execution planning and release-cycle automation.
• Orchestration Services: Built REST services to orchestrate frontend, API, and end-to-end automated test runs.
• Scalability: Worked on frameworks supporting large-scale test automation across multiple products and releases.

B.Tech in Computer Science & Engineering – International Institute of Information Technology, Bhubaneswar (IIIT-BH) (2012-01 – 2016-12)