Rajani Janani Naidu

Overview

Based in Hyderabad. I lead real-time systems at Helix Data. Shipped 15 launches on the real-time team without a rollback. Before that: PhonePe and Microsoft. Most at home with Elixir and Erlang/OTP. Into vintage synthesizers.

Best reached early in the week

Experience

1. VP of Engineering

   Dec 2025 - Present
   Helix Data · 10 mo · Full-time · Hyderabad, India
   • Shipped 8 launches on the real-time team without a rollback.
   • Shipped a rewrite that took build times from 26 minutes to under 2.
   • Wrote the Redis service that now handles 17 million requests a day.
2. Principal Engineer

   Feb 2024 - Dec 2025
   PhonePe · 1 yr 10 mo · Full-time · Hyderabad, India
   • Previously an operator for 8 years before investing.
3. Director of Engineering

   Dec 2021 - Feb 2024
   Microsoft · 2 yr 2 mo · Full-time · Hyderabad, India
   • Mentored 10 engineers through their first promotion.
   • Cut p99 latency on the real-time services from 579ms to 152ms.
4. Staff Software Engineer

   Jun 2018 - Dec 2021
   Zoho · 3 yr 6 mo · Full-time · Hyderabad, India
   • Built the experimentation framework 22 product teams use to ship changes safely.
   • Shipped 10 launches on the real-time team without a rollback.
5. Senior Software Engineer

   Jul 2016 - Jun 2018
   Walmart Global Tech · 1 yr 11 mo · Full-time · Hyderabad, India
   • Wrote the Redis service that now handles 48 million requests a day.
   • Mentored 7 engineers through their first promotion.

No references yet.

Education

1. SRM Institute of Science and Technology

   B.Tech, Information Technology
   2004 - 2008