Industry Forum – Research-A-Thon Spring 2024

Nikhilesh Katakam

My Name is Nikhilesh Katakam. I graduated with a Master’s degree in computer science at UMKC. During my master’s program, I’ve had an opportunity to work on my thesis under the guidance of Dr. Yugyung Lee and Dr. Dinkar. I am currently working as a Principal Software Engineer at WalmartLabs. I have been in the tech industry for 9 years and had the opportunity to work for multiple companies where I predominantly did web development.

In my free time, I enjoy learning and experimenting with new technologies. On a personal front, I live in the bay area with my wife and daughter.

Ragunandan Rao

Raghu is a Software developer at Adobe Systems. In this role he works on developing applications that interact with various third party clients and business partners in providing Adobe’s document services to a broad customer base. He had graduated from UMKC in December 2016 with a Masters degree in Computer Science. He was a participant, an organizer and also an advocate of the UMKC Hack-A-Roo. On a lighter note he has never won the event.

Malathy Krishnan

Malathy Krishnan, A passionate Software Professional who loves to learn and grow everyday! She graduated from UMKC with a Master’s in Computer Science. She has worked for Paypal , IBM and is currently employed at HR Block. At Block Malathy has worked on critical systems like Individual Data Management, Operational Data Store, Client Data Service. In her spare time, she loves to develop apps, design business ideas, dance and do crafts with kids.

Mom of 2 beautiful girls, based out of Kansas City.

Kartik Vishwanath

Kartik Vishwanath is an Engineering Director at Square, responsible for the company’s Identity and Access Management (IAM) organization, enabling customers (both internal and external) to secure their workloads in the cloud by providing authentication and authorization mechanisms to all of Square. Before joining Square in May 2020, Kartik was an Engineering Leader at Amazon Web Services (AWS) where he led engineering and product for AWS Lambda’s core APIs and Network infrastructure (VPC Lambda functions) teams. Prior to AWS, Kartik headed Amazon’s Catalog Fact Extraction teams where he played a key role in development of real-time machine learning platforms that extracted product features from multimodal input.

Kartik has over 10+ years of experience building and leading large customer centric multi-disciplinary teams, setting vision and strategy and driving an inclusive culture across his organizations. Kartik earned a Master of Science degree in Computer Science from the University of Missouri – Kansas City, where he was a member of the UMKC distributed intelligent computing association.

Megha Sharma

Megha graduated from UMKC in 2014 with a Master’s degree in Computer Science. She has worked as a Distributed Systems Engineer for the Cloud Infrastructure Engineering team at Apple for over 5 years. At Apple she worked on building the internal cloud platform which offered reliability, observability and fault tolerance to its many applications. Her focus has been on solving problems involving scale, performance and concurrency as well as making contributions to Apache Mesos. She joined TikTok earlier this year and currently works on the Application Security team where she builds solutions at scale to maintain strong security in the fast paced environment of the popular social platform. In her spare time she loves to catch up on Netflix and painting.