I led an eight-engineer team at Apple across Seattle, London, and partner sites in Europe and Latin America, mentoring engineers to promotion, shaping performance reviews, and driving hiring. At Amazon, I led an eight-engineer team on the Alexa Core Engine and mentored half the team from entry level to promotion.
Sep 2025 – Present
Praxtera AI Institute
CTO and Curriculum Designer, AI/ML Executive Education
Philadelphia-based AI executive-education firm · concurrent with the Apple role
Designed an executive AI curriculum built on original Wharton research and taught it to C-suite leaders at HP, Morgan Lewis, PBS, and the Philadelphia Eagles, helping executives evaluate, govern, and deploy AI.
Keynoted the Philadelphia Eagles' 12th annual Eagles Care Summit at Lincoln Financial Field on March 18, 2026, delivering "AI for Impact" to more than 300 community and business leaders.
Won the Benjamin Franklin Award (peer-voted; one of three recipients in a class of 250).
Made the Director's List in all six terms.
Earned First Year Honors.
Completed five majors: AI in Business · Strategic Management · Operations, Information & Decision-Making · Entrepreneurship & Innovation · Business Analytics.
Led an eight-engineer team across Seattle, London, and partner sites in Europe and Latin America.
Led architecture and cross-functional delivery of Apple's media knowledge graph, the canonical model unifying 15+ sources to power search, recommendations, and discovery for over 100 million users.
Mentored engineers to promotion, shaped performance reviews, and drove hiring; set the design-review and CI/CD standards that lifted team velocity 30% and cut production incidents 45%.
Built and shipped production agentic AI: an LLM ops assistant for debugging logs, traces, and metrics over MCP in natural language, and a skill platform that turned pipeline work into plain-English workflows for daily, on-call use.
Led the four-office global launch of Apple Music Credits (Cupertino, Seattle, London, Singapore), coordinating a 15-engineer cross-functional program to deliver real-time credits curation for millions of tracks.
Drove the platform from batch to real-time streaming, re-architecting ingestion, similarity mapping, and graph generation from Spark onto an event-driven Flink, Kafka, and Cassandra stack.
Designed the ML entity-resolution system pairing similarity mapping with clustering to deduplicate entities across sources, lifting data quality 40% while cutting downstream cost.
Owned the graph query services and the client library for partner teams to build on, and set the shared Protobuf contracts adopted across the platform.
Apr 2018 – Feb 2021
Amazon
Senior Software Engineer, Alexa
Seattle, WA · Promoted from SDE II (L5) to Senior SDE (L6)
Led an eight-engineer team on the Alexa Core Engine.
Designed a GraphQL data-aggregation and caching platform for the Alexa Engine whose annotation-driven rule engine batched and clustered results to the right downstream services, saving $40M a year and lifting model accuracy 40%.
Mentored half the team from entry level to promotion, earning selection for Amazon's Mentorship and Leadership Development Program.
Collapsed partner onboarding from two weeks to 15 minutes with a self-service rapid-deployment platform.
Owned operational excellence, driving the weekly issue count from 40 to 10 and re-engineering the new-user registration flow to cut peak-holiday customer issues tenfold.
Led capacity planning for Prime Day and Black Friday, forecasting hardware demand and winning leadership's commitment to expand the fleet ahead of peak.
Nov 2016 – Mar 2018
Susquehanna International Group (SIG)
Senior Financial Data Engineer
Philadelphia, PA · Promoted from Financial Data Engineer
Led real-time FINRA compliance surveillance across the firm's market-making transactions in C++, Python/Pandas, and Django, flagging violations at the moment of execution.
Designed and shipped a real-time hardware asset-tracking system that automated capacity scaling and ended chronic inter-team coordination failures.
Mar 2015 – Oct 2016
Microsoft
Software Development Engineer, Windows OS Group
Redmond, WA
Cut Windows 10 Mobile Mail power consumption 4x against the Windows Phone 8 baseline, and set the app's power targets.
Drove product decisions with telemetry: real-time dashboards, weekly guidance to leadership, and the data-derived default for the auto-sync interval.
Fall 2014
Carnegie Mellon University
Projects · Drone-Megaddon
Implemented an end-to-end cyberphysical system in which a high-level, StarCraft-like RTS interface controlled drone swarms.
Krishnan, S., & Ting, D. (2014). Drone-Megaddon: A Real-Time Strategy Interface for Managing Drone Swarms. engrXiv (archived 2026).
Krishnan, S., & Ting, D. (2026). Drone-Megaddon 2026: Co-Intelligent Swarm Control with Language and Vision Models. engrXiv.
Unified the logging system: designed a single common schema for every team's log messages, convinced the teams to adopt it, and consolidated their custom loggers under one shared framework.
Built a log tracer on that framework that traced API calls end to end, pinpointing where in the flow a request failed and what the failure was.
Sped up the logging system 15% for 8M+ customers.
Spring 2014
Carnegie Mellon University
Embedded Capstone (18-549) · Hand-2048
Reconfigured the hit game 2048 to take hand motions as input, using a Raspberry Pi and an Asus Xtion Pro motion sensor in a motion-sensing-and-actuating framework.
Wrote the team's Raspberry Pi setup guide for headless SSH access from a laptop and for building the OpenNI 2 samples on the Pi.
Switched gesture tracking from an open palm to a closed fist after the Xtion Pro picked up other parts of the body, turning an unsteady position reading into a stable one.
Developed a Django admin interface for building managers.
May 2013 – Dec 2013
Carnegie Mellon University
Web Applications Course Developer · Teaching Assistant
Created a cloud platform for course administration.
Instructed 105+ students as Agile Product Owner for their final projects.
Redesigned the Web Applications course with the professor, planning a 20-lecture semester from client-side code and HTTP through relational and NoSQL databases, servlets, security, and Django, plus a follow-on Web Application Frameworks course.
Built the client-side exercise set: HTML5, CSS3, and JavaScript demos, from form validation and a calculator to single-player Pong and an image gallery, each with extension exercises.
Designed server-side exercises on sessions, cookies, and relational databases, an HTML-injection exercise on Django template escaping, and a deliberately flawed Django app for students to expose by writing tests.
Built reference survey apps in Spring MVC, Play, and Django, taking the Spring version through six releases on Google App Engine with image upload, AJAX editing, and survey recommendations.
Designed a bacterial simulator to replace live culture experiments.
2010 – Dec 2014
Carnegie Mellon University
M.S. and B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering
Pittsburgh, PA
Earned an M.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering, GPA 4.00/4.00 · Dec 2014.
Earned a B.S. in Electrical & Computer Engineering with a minor in Business Administration · May 2014.
Made the Dean's List, Carnegie Institute of Technology · 2012, 2013, 2014.
Apple · People
Led an eight-engineer team across Seattle, London, and partner sites in Europe and Latin America.
Apple · People
Mentored engineers to promotion, shaped performance reviews, and drove hiring; set the design-review and CI/CD standards that lifted team velocity 30% and cut production incidents 45%.
Apple · People
Led the four-office global launch of Apple Music Credits (Cupertino, Seattle, London, Singapore), coordinating a 15-engineer cross-functional program to deliver real-time credits curation for millions of tracks.
Apple · Systems
Led architecture and cross-functional delivery of Apple's media knowledge graph, the canonical model unifying 15+ sources to power search, recommendations, and discovery for over 100 million users.
Apple · Systems
Drove the platform from batch to real-time streaming, re-architecting ingestion, similarity mapping, and graph generation from Spark onto an event-driven Flink, Kafka, and Cassandra stack.
Apple · Decisions
Owned the graph query services and the client library for partner teams to build on, and set the shared Protobuf contracts adopted across the platform.
Amazon Alexa · People
Led an eight-engineer team on the Alexa Core Engine.
Amazon Alexa · People
Mentored half the team from entry level to promotion, earning selection for Amazon's Mentorship and Leadership Development Program.
Amazon Alexa · Systems
Owned operational excellence, driving the weekly issue count from 40 to 10 and re-engineering the new-user registration flow to cut peak-holiday customer issues tenfold.
Amazon Alexa · Decisions
Led capacity planning for Prime Day and Black Friday, forecasting hardware demand and winning leadership's commitment to expand the fleet ahead of peak.
Praxtera · People
Keynoted the Philadelphia Eagles' 12th annual Eagles Care Summit at Lincoln Financial Field on March 18, 2026, delivering "AI for Impact" to more than 300 community and business leaders.
Designed an executive AI curriculum built on original Wharton research and taught it to C-suite leaders at HP, Morgan Lewis, PBS, and the Philadelphia Eagles, helping executives evaluate, govern, and deploy AI.
Carnegie Mellon · People
Instructed 105+ students as Agile Product Owner for their final projects.
Carnegie Mellon · Systems
Created a cloud platform for course administration.
Carnegie Mellon · Decisions
Redesigned the Web Applications course with the professor, planning a 20-lecture semester from client-side code and HTTP through relational and NoSQL databases, servlets, security, and Django, plus a follow-on Web Application Frameworks course.
Microsoft · SIG · Decisions
Drove product decisions with telemetry: real-time dashboards, weekly guidance to leadership, and the data-derived default for the auto-sync interval.
Microsoft · SIG · Decisions
Cut Windows 10 Mobile Mail power consumption 4x against the Windows Phone 8 baseline, and set the app's power targets.
Microsoft · SIG · Systems
Led real-time FINRA compliance surveillance across the firm's market-making transactions in C++, Python/Pandas, and Django, flagging violations at the moment of execution.
Recommendations.
Jonas Pulver · Head of Communications & Culture, Swiss Embassy in Japan · Wharton EMBA learning teams · 2026
“Sai is one of the most impressive peers I met at Wharton. He combines deep technical expertise in AI and engineering with genuine empathy, strong intrinsic motivation, and a rare ability to bring together individuals with very different perspectives and personalities. He leads with clarity and purpose, consistently elevating the performance of those around him.”
“In team settings, Sai naturally takes on complex, high-stakes challenges that require a sophisticated blend of analytics, operations, decision-making, and executive communication. He not only develops sharp, well-structured solutions, but also brings them to life as a compelling storyteller, equally effective with colleagues, senior stakeholders, and board-level audiences.”
“I am confident Sai will excel as a high-impact manager and a purpose-driven leader. Any organization would be fortunate to have him.”
Gajendra Babu Thokala · Senior Engineering Leader, Apple · Knowledge Graph team, four years · 2026
“Sairam has a deep commitment to his work; if there is something that needs to be completed, he acts on it immediately. As such, over time, I and others in our team rely on him for this response.”
“That rapid response to challenges is combined with a relatively rare combination of both solid technical ability and a sense of ownership over the issues he addresses. He learns the context surrounding a problem rapidly, he can accelerate into new domains quickly and collaborate well with other teams when a solution requires input from various areas of expertise.”
“He continues to provide support to those around him, whether by removing obstacles for colleagues, expanding on his own responsibilities or providing a consistent source of calmness during stressful periods.”
“As a result, Sairam will make a tangible impact on any engineering organization.”
Apple manager review · 2025
“As Issue Response Lead, Sairam takes ownership of both maintenance of the production systems and the ongoing releases, and communicates with the team when issues are ongoing. He also served as an important mentor to an engineer on the Data Products team, helping her ramp up effectively on this complex system.”
Apple manager review · 2024
“A trend across all of Sairam’s work is his focus on always making quality-of-life improvements to whatever system he is working on. His contributions have saved everyone on the team time, every day. There are countless other examples, and they are invaluable to the team continuing to grow.”
Apple manager review · 2023
“Sairam has been instrumental in numerous key projects within the team. His dedication and effective problem-solving received commendations from various partner teams for staying on top of every necessary fix and providing support to cross-functional teams. This year has been phenomenal for Sairam and the team.”
Manoj Mandam · Principal Engineer · Amazon, same team · 2020
“He is usually the first person in the team to step forward to take up any challenge. He is technically very strong and always puts extra effort to get things moving. Many times I felt comfortable discussing problems and solutions with him.”
Connie Yao · Software Engineer, Google · ex-Amazon · Amazon, same team · 2020
“Sairam is a great engineer; he's very knowledgeable when it comes to system design and continuously seeks out new ways to improve the projects he works on. A great team player who works both diligently and smartly.”
Xinghai Zhang · Software Engineer · Same team · 2020
“Sairam is very detail oriented and at the same time has a bias for action. He often comes up with new tools and ideas for simplification that makes the team more efficient and productive.”
Wayne Carson · Senior Data Engineer · Susquehanna International Group · 2018
“The requirements were initially soft and he was willing and able to iterate back and forth as the requirements became clear. He included reasonable testing and validation. The jobs run reliably every day without intervention. It’s good solid code.”
Andy Davidson · Software Engineer · Same team · 2016
“Sairam is a quick learner and eager to tackle different technical problems. Sairam is great to work with and makes the team better with his contributions.”