---
title: "Balaji V - Head of Platform, Yahoo Finance in San Mateo | Tal"
description: "Meet Balaji V, Engineering Leader | Data Infrastructure & Distributed Systems | Scalable Platforms | Ex-Facebook, Cruise, startup based in San Mateo. AI stack includes gemini, meta, and openai."
image: "https://tal.club/meet/s-balaji/share-image"
---

# Balaji V on Tal

## Headline

Engineering Leader \| Data Infrastructure & Distributed Systems \| Scalable Platforms \| Ex\-Facebook, Cruise, startup

## About

Engineering leader with 15\+ years of experience architecting and scaling large\-scale data platforms, distributed storage systems, and core data libraries\. Proven ability to build and lead engineering organizations of 20–50\+ members, delivering cloud\-native services and data infrastructure used across multiple product domains\. Deep expertise in Spark, Flink, Iceberg, distributed databases, KV stores, streaming systems, MLOps, and high\-availability platforms across Yahoo, Facebook, Cruise, and startups\. Skilled at defining technical vision for core data infra, APIs, data governance, telemetry, and observability\. Key Skills: Distributed Systems • Data Infrastructure • Cloud Services \(AWS, GCP\) • Spark, Flink, Iceberg, Data Lakes & Warehouses • Scalable Storage & Databases • Real\-Time Streaming • Time\-Series & KV Stores • Caching Systems • Telemetry & Observability • Data Governance • MLOps • Microservices • Kubernetes • Leadership & Org Growth • Technical Vision & Architecture

## Location

San Mateo

## AI stack

gemini

meta

openai

perplexity

## Work experience

Head of Platform, Yahoo Finance at Yahoo, 2025 \- Present · 1 yr 9 mos, \- Data Platform, distributed services such as API serving and Search

Senior Engineering Manager, Data Platform at Yahoo, 2023 \- Present · 3 yrs 9 mos, \- Manage platform teams delivering distributed serving systems, stream processing \(Spark, Flink\), and data lake \(Iceberg\) solutions for Yahoo Finance products\. \- Built and operated large\-scale key\-value serving systems supporting personalization pipelines, handling billions of events/day with strict latency SLAs\. \- Led adoption of streaming \+ batch unification and lakehouse technologies for petabyte\-scale user engagement data\. \- Improved cross\-org developer experience and reliability with self\-serve APIs, schema governance, and observability for serving systems\. \- Built and operated feature store and real\-time ML data pipelines, enabling personalized services such as trending tickers and sentiment analysis, and standardizing feature access for ML teams across Yahoo\.

Head of Engineering/Director at Dgraph Labs, 2020 \- 2022 · 2 yrs, \- Directed engineering teams developing Dgraph, an open\-source distributed graph DB using Raft consensus for highly available transactions\. \- Designed and shipped Badger, a high\-performance LSM\-tree key\-value store in Go, widely adopted by external systems \(e\.g\., Jaeger distributed tracing\)\. \- Built Ristretto, an embedded caching system optimized for throughput and memory efficiency, integrated into Dgraph\. \- Operated managed DB services on AWS and GCP for enterprise customers, ensuring availability, scalability, and security\.

Engineering Manager, Data Platform at Cruise Automation, 2017 \- 2020 · 3 yrs, San Francisco Bay Area, \- Built and operated a petabyte\-scale data lake and warehouse to support autonomous vehicle development\. \- Delivered real\-time ingestion \(billions of events/day\) and batch processing \(hundreds of TB/day\) pipelines to generate metrics for fleet operations and simulations\. \- Designed and implemented a distributed time\-series database for high\-frequency sensor telemetry\. \- Partnered with AV operations, ML, and simulation teams to ensure low\-latency, reliable data infra for critical decision\-making\. \- Led ML enablement initiatives, partnering with perception and data science teams to manage labeled datasets and automate takeover analysis pipelines, accelerating model training and validation for autonomous vehicle systems\.

Engineering Lead, Data Platform at Meta, 2014 \- 2017 · 3 yrs, \- Developed global log collection, storage, and processing infra spanning all Facebook data centers, enabling analytics for all devices\. \- Leveraged distributed KV stores \(RocksDB\) and time\-series databases to build large\-scale observability and alerting systems across Facebook data centers\. \- Designed disaster recovery pipelines capturing periodic snapshots of devices, enabling rollback and fast recovery\.

Technical Lead at Cisco, 2008 \- 2013 · 5 yrs, Developed distributed backend services powering global video conferencing platforms\.

## Education

MS, Computer Science, The University of Texas at Austin

BE, Computer Science, PSG College of Technology

[View the original profile](https://tal.club/meet/s-balaji)

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