Karthika Raghavan

Karthika Raghavan

Software Engineer • Distributed Systems • LLM Infrastructure

About

Hey, I’m Karthika 👋

I’m a Software Engineer who has spent a decade convincing distributed systems to behave. Sometimes they dont listen.

My specialty is the infrastructure nobody sees until it breaks: Kafka pipelines that handle 100K events/sec, EKS migrations that don’t page you at 3am, DNS control planes that actually control things (definitely not designing this website)

I also hold a PhD in Computational Complex Systems with a focus on genomics and bioinformatics — which is a fancy way of saying I’m comfortable with ambiguity and large datasets.

Where I’ve been

Cisco — Kafka whisperer, EKS migration leader, and saved $100K+/year on secrets management. That was 60% of our team’s operational budget, y’know?

MasterCard — Fintech data engineering. Learned that money is just numbers until compliance says otherwise.

D-Wave — Scheduled jobs on actual quantum computers. Yes, they’re real. No, I can’t explain how they work. Nobody can.

Enbala — Real-time power grid control. The kind of system where “move fast and break things” is a felony.

Currently, I’m building open-source tools at the intersection of LLMs and infrastructure. You can see them on my projects page — they’re more interesting than this paragraph.

Community

I run AI Assembly, a women-in-tech community (via whatsapp, into slack in future) with 30 developers/leaders and growing. We host workshops, share resources, and occasionally complain about traveling in the AI high speed rail (harder to keep up). If you’re a woman in tech interested in AI/ML, let’s connect.

Get in touch

I’m based in Vancouver, BC — open to remote and hybrid roles in platform engineering, ML infrastructure, or anything where I get to make systems reliable at scale. If you’re building interesting infrastructure, I’d love to chat.