ANKUSH KHANDELWAL
Software Engineer
New Delhi
Summary
Software Engineer with a Master's by Research from IIIT Hyderabad and over 8 years of experience building petabytescale distributed systems, secure backend architectures, and high-performance core database components at Microsoft and AWS. Proven expertise in modern C++, distributed data processing, and Knowledge Graph infrastructure, coupled with a strong academic background in Natural Language Processing and Deep Learning. Passionate about leveraging systems engineering to scale GenAI and Machine Learning applications.
Overview
8
8
years of professional experience
Work History
Software Engineer 2
Microsoft
New Delhi
10.2023 - Current
- Designed and built a distributed automation framework enforcing least-privilege access controls across 150K+ Azure VMs.
- Implemented deterministic ACL reconciliation mechanisms eliminating inherited privilege escalation on certificate private keys.
- Migrated legacy certificate-based authentication flows to a centralized token validation architecture across 20+ backend services.
- Built policy-driven validation pipelines with strong guarantees around correctness, backward compatibility, and failure isolation.
- Led architectural reviews focusing on invariants, race conditions, threat modeling, and distributed failure modes.
- Coordinated with other engineers to evaluate and improve software and hardware interfaces.
- Collaborated with fellow engineers to evaluate software and hardware interfaces.
Software Development Engineer 2
Amazon Web Services (AWS)
08.2022 - 08.2023
- Developed core components of Amazon Aurora's distributed database architecture in modern C++ (C++17).
- Designed and implemented a TLS-based authentication and impersonation layer enabling secure multi-tenant isolation across distributed shards.
- Built thread-safe abstractions and synchronization mechanisms ensuring deterministic behavior under high concurrency.
- Analyzed memory usage, lock contention, and latency-critical paths to improve system throughput and reliability.
- Performed adversarial threat modeling and protocol validation under partial failures and network partitions.
- Collaborated on stages of systems development lifecycle from requirement gathering to production releases.
- Translated customer requirements into written use cases.
Software Engineer 2
Microsoft
12.2020 - 07.2022
- Built backend services powering high-QPS travel search systems.
- Designed low-latency microservices with strong consistency guarantees across distributed data aggregation layers.
- Developed test harnesses and verification workflows ensuring deterministic behavior under production-scale workloads.
- Coordinated with other engineers to evaluate and improve software and hardware interfaces.
- Collaborated with management, internal and development partners regarding software application design status and project progress.
Software Engineer
Microsoft
07.2018 - 11.2020
- Created user-facing search experiences like Entity Carousels by leveraging Bing's large-scale Knowledge Graph.
- Queried and analyzed petabyte-scale datasets to extract insights and enrich metadata within the graph.
- Conducted data modeling, performance and integration testing.
- Translated technical concepts and information into terms parties could easily comprehend.
Education
Masters - Computer Science by Research
05.2018
GPA: 9/10
Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) - Computer Science
05.2017
GPA: 8/10
Skills
- C
- C
- C#
- Python
- Go
- Java
- Rust
- AWS
- Azure
- AzureML
- MySQL
- PostgreSQL
- Linux
- Windows
- Mac
- Distributed Systems
- Micro-services
- Machine Learning
- Natural Language Processing
- Artificial Intelligence
- GenAI
Websites
Awards
Runner-up in Microsoft's Code.Fun.Do
Publications
- Humor Detection in English-Hindi Code-Mixed Social Media Content, 11th edition of the Language Resources and Evaluation Conference, LREC, Japan, 2018
- Gender Prediction in English-Hindi Code-Mixed Social Media Content, International Conference on Computational Linguistics and Intelligent Text Processing, CICLing, Singapore, 2018
- Classification of Spanish Election Tweets, IberEval'17, Spain, 2017
Projects
Box Office Revenue Prediction Using Deep Neural Networks, 2016-05-01, 2016-07-01, Developed a predictive analytics model to forecast box office revenue using machine learning and deep learning techniques in Python.
Timeline
Software Engineer 2 - Microsoft
10.2023 - Current
Software Development Engineer 2 - Amazon Web Services (AWS)
08.2022 - 08.2023
Software Engineer 2 - Microsoft
12.2020 - 07.2022
Software Engineer - Microsoft
07.2018 - 11.2020
International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad - Masters, Computer Science by Research
International Institute of Information Technology (IIIT) Hyderabad - Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech), Computer Science