Headline

SDE-2 @ Ola | Building Scalable Search Solutions

About

Software Engineer with experience building large-scale search systems and low-latency APIs. At Ola Maps, I work on designing and improving search infrastructure powering place discovery and navigation experiences. My work focuses on improving search relevance, ranking quality, and query recovery for large-scale search systems. I have worked on building and optimizing search pipelines including autocomplete ranking, query parsing, spell correction, and fallback retrieval mechanisms. I also developed an ML-based ranking model using XGBoost for autocomplete and implemented popularity-based ranking strategies that significantly improved search accuracy. Some of the areas I work on include: - Search ranking and relevance tuning - Query parsing and spelling correction systems - Low-latency backend APIs for search and geospatial services - Search accuracy testing and observability pipelines Tech stack: Node.js, Python, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL, Redis. I’m particularly interested in building scalable backend systems and solving complex engineering problems in distributed systems.

Location

Bengaluru

AI stack

antigravity

claude

codex

cursor

opencode

claudecode

Work experience

SDE-2 at Ola, Aug 2024 - Present · 2 yrs 1 mo, On-site, • Developed and integrated an ML-based XGBoost ranking model for the Autocomplete pipeline, improving overall search accuracy by 4%. • Implemented popularity-based ranking strategies for the Autocomplete Search API, improving search accuracy by 12%. • Built a distributed spelling correction service to recover results from misspelled or incomplete queries, improving null query match rates by nearly 50%. • Designed fallback retrieval mechanisms using Elasticsearch fuzziness to reduce null search outcomes by 60%. • Led improvements to monitoring and alerting for search services, tracking SLIs such as latency, throughput, and error rate. • Designed the high-level architecture for a disaster recovery system to improve reliability and fault tolerance of the search service.

SDE at Ola, Jun 2022 - Jul 2024 · 2 yrs 2 mos, Bengaluru, • Designed and developed core search APIs including Nearby Search, Text Search, Forward Geocoding, and Search Along Route for the Ola Maps platform. • Built a Street Lookup feature to retrieve the nearest street for a given location, improving reverse geocoding experience by 70%. • Developed a Point-In-Polygon API to extract address components for a location using tokenization and aggregation strategies. • Built an automated search accuracy testing pipeline using Airflow to validate search relevance after code or data changes. • Refactored the Node.js service from ES5 to ES6, improving code maintainability and reducing service latency by ~25%. • Built internal CRUD tools using Next.js, PostgreSQL, and Elasticsearch for efficient POI management by operations teams.

Education

Bachelor's degree, Computer Science, Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology