Hello, I'm

Vikas Murthy

Engineering Leader & Staff Engineer

Building and scaling distributed systems serving millions of users. Leading cross-functional teams to deliver ML-powered solutions at scale.

Vikas N Murthy
Scroll

Engineering Leadership at Scale

I'm an Engineering Leader and Staff Software Engineer at Walmart Global Tech, leading multi-team engineering efforts across E-Commerce domains to deliver scalable, low-latency platforms serving millions of daily users.

With over a decade of experience, I specialize in building distributed systems, deploying ML-powered solutions, and leading cross-functional teams to deliver business-critical products. I champion engineering excellence through clean architecture, CI/CD best practices, robust observability, and a strong incident response culture.

I mentor engineers across levels, drive Agile delivery with quarterly OKRs, and align team efforts with business outcomes. I hold a Master's degree in Computer Science from USC, with focus on NLP, AI, and distributed systems.

10+ Years Experience
M+ Daily Users Served
3B SKUs Enabled

What I Do

Engineering Leadership

Leading cross-functional teams, mentoring engineers, and driving Agile delivery with OKRs and metrics

System Architecture

Designing scalable, distributed systems handling millions of requests under strict SLAs

ML & Data Platforms

Deploying ML model inference workflows and ETL pipelines for real-time decisioning at scale

Stream Processing

Building real-time pipelines with Kafka and stream processing for peak seasonal traffic

Professional Journey

Mar 2024 - Present

Staff Software Engineer / Manager

Walmart Global Tech, Sunnyvale

Led multi-team engineering efforts across E-Commerce domains, delivering scalable, low-latency platforms for product setup, translation, and order fulfillment systems supporting millions of daily users. Partnered with Product and Data Science teams to deploy ML-driven ranking and catalog content quality models.

  • Scaled distributed systems using Kafka and stream processing for peak seasonal traffic
  • Championed engineering excellence through clean architecture and CI/CD best practices
  • Mentored engineers, led performance reviews, and implemented Agile delivery with OKRs
Engineering Leadership Distributed Systems ML Platforms Kafka
Mar 2023 - Mar 2024

Staff Software Engineer

Walmart Global Tech, Sunnyvale

Led a team to design and deploy scalable ETL pipelines for multilingual product catalog data, ensuring high-quality datasets for ML model training. Designed ML model inference workflows for search query and product translation.

  • Improved search conversion by 4% through multilingual translation ML models
  • Built internal tooling for translation data quality management used by linguists
Team Leadership ETL Pipelines ML Inference NLP
Oct 2021 - Mar 2023

Staff Software Engineer

Walmart Global Tech, Sunnyvale

Led a team of engineers in transforming the item setup pipeline to handle higher throughput and support cloud elasticity using principles defined in the Reactive Manifesto.

  • Increased unique SKUs on walmart.com from 700M to 3B through data platform integration
  • Enabled seamless omnichannel availability by merging grocery app with Walmart One app
  • Drove increased customer traffic and sales across marketplace and grocery domains
Technical Leadership Reactive Systems Data Platforms Omnichannel

Education

🎓

Master of Science

University of Southern California

Computer Science • Dec 2016 • GPA: 3.68

NLP, AI, Information Retrieval, Analysis of Algorithms

Featured Projects

Comments Summarization
NLP / Machine Learning

Comment Summarization System

A system that automatically summarizes comments by selecting representative comments using topic-based clustering (LDA) and precedence-based ranking.

View Project
Hotel Review Classifier
Machine Learning

Hotel Review Classifier

A Naive Bayes classifier to identify hotel reviews as truthful/deceptive and positive/negative using sentiment analysis.

View Project
Search Engine
Information Retrieval

Google-like Search Engine

A search engine built with crawler4j and Apache Solr, featuring PageRank algorithm, spell correction, and auto-suggest functionality.

View Project
Mancala Game
Artificial Intelligence

Mancala Game AI

A game-playing agent using minimax algorithm with alpha-beta pruning to determine optimal moves in the ancient game of Mancala.

View Project
POS Tagger
NLP

Part of Speech Tagger

Hidden Markov Model based POS tagger for Catalan language, using probabilistic sequence modeling for linguistic analysis.

View Project
Inference Engine
Artificial Intelligence

First Order Logic Inference

An inference engine implementing resolution-based theorem proving for first-order logic knowledge bases.

View Project

Let's Connect

I'm always interested in hearing about new opportunities, collaborations, or just having a chat about technology. Feel free to reach out!

Union City, California