
Varun Tarikere Shankarappa
Work Experience

Teaching Assistant, Manning College of Information and Computer Science, UMass, Amherst
June 2024 – Nov 2024
- Evaluated and graded assignments, projects, and exams, ensuring accurate assessment of students' understanding of software engineering principles(COMPSCI-520).
- Provided constructive feedback to students, helping them improve their coding practices, design techniques, and problem-solving skills.

Graduate Student Researcher, Human Centered Robotics Lab , UMass, Amherst
June 2024 – Nov 2024
- Optimized a model for frame-level fault detection in collaborative autonomous systems, processing 30 images per timestep from 5 agents in the DeepAccident dataset.
- Conducted an in-depth analysis of dataset structure and identified key challenges impacting detection outcomes.
- Designed and implemented a denoising-based fault detection model with Vector Quantized GANs and Graph Attention Networks as pre-training, exploring enhanced learning for fault detection in multi-agent autonomous systems.
- Optimized a non-linear MPC-WBIC controller through semi-black box fine-tuning, tailoring it for improved performance on the Go1 robot platform.

Dining Hall Supervisor (Part-Time), Auxiliary Enterprises, UMass, Amherst
Sep 2023 – Dec 2024
- Led and motivated team members to maintain high performance and productivity, ensuring smooth operations across all work areas.
- Strategically managed employee break schedules to balance workload and optimize efficiency.
- Demonstrated strong attention to detail by ensuring allergens were accurately identified and communicated, fostering a safe and compliant work environment.
Software Development Engineer - I, Eagleview, Bengaluru
Aug 2020 – Dec 2022
- Assisted in designing and led implementation of an event-based notification service handling push, email, and iOS notifications via AWS SQS and SNS, supporting 1,000+ concurrent requests.
- Gained proficiency in C# and delivered critical release APIs within one week.
- Delivered 6+ Golang and Python microservices, collaborating with cross-continental agile teams.
- Contributed to migrating a legacy platform to a serverless orchestrator using AWS Step Functions and Lambda, reducing service time from 3 hours to 45 minutes.
- Achieved 60% latency reduction for large file downloads by implementing gRPC stream APIs.
- Enhanced service performance and resolved critical bugs through regular load and performance testing.
- Translated business-critical MATLAB code handling geospatial data to Python, increasing scalability and reducing latency by over 70%.
- Participated in the full SDLC of Assess, an online imagery inspection tool with a $1M+ projected revenue.
- Proposed OpenTelemetry integration for serverless tracing, improving logging and debugging capabilities.
- Participated in code reviews to ensure clean, tested, readable and maintainable codebase to maintain 90% code coverage.
Software Development Engineer Intern, Eagleview, Bengaluru
Jan 2020 – June 2020
- Delivered 15+ APIs for a critical process and improved API documentation, reducing cross-team dependency and cutting development time by 15%..
- Presented a study on ElasticSearch-Logstash-Kibana (ELK) stack for observability, demonstrating its potential to trace points of failure within 30 minutes and deliver key analytical insights.
- Proto-typed a dashboard to automate version tracking, cutting manual checks and documentation time by 50%.

Research Intern, Center for Cloud and Big Data, PES University, Bengaluru
May 2018 – Aug 2018
- Researched on federated clouds using OpenStack.
- Conducted a feasibility study of federated container service using Mesos in Openstack.