About me

Where I’m from

My name is Karthik Velayutham. I was born in California and grew up in the suburbs of Dallas, Texas, where my childhood was filled with curiosity, exploration, and adventure within my own little world. I was an avid reader and, for much of my early life, I believed my path would lead me to becoming a doctor until one day, a Popular Science article on 3D printers completely shifted my perspective. It was a revelation — I discovered a fascination with technology that I couldn’t ignore and nothing was the same ever since!

What I do now

I’m currently a software engineer at an HFT firm based in Chicago, IL.

What I used to do

I am fortunate enough to have a diversity of experiences in my short career. I previosuly worked at Ponder, a data engineering startup that was acquired by Snowflake. Our main product was building a pandas-to-SQL transpiler which has now been integrated into Snowflake’s Pandas-on-Snowflake offering!

Before that, I worked at Katana Graph, a startup focused on building a performant graph database. During that stint, I also graduated with a B.S. & M.S. in Computer Science from the University of Texas at Austin, where I was a Turing Scholar. Hook Em’ Horns!

What my technical interests are

I am passionate about systems-related work and anything low-level in general. Some of the projects that I have worked on:

• Paravirtual OS
• Threading libraries
• Compiler for a low-level language
• C-library for Merkle Tree-based hashing for faster build times (intern project at VMware)
• FPGA device scheduler (provision “virtual” FPGAs for students to use)

I’ve also spent extensive time contributing to many well known OSS projects in the Python Data ecosystem such as Modin, Pandas, Dask, Ray, fsspec, and Nuitka (Compiler to create executables for Python repos).

Research experience & misc.

In a previous life, I worked in the SPARTA lab under Dr. Boyles where I messed around with transporation engineering simulations and parallelized optimization algorithms. Notably, I worked on adding parallelization capabilities to Tap-B, a fast and efficient implementation for the traffic assignment problem (see Github). I also worked in the SCEA lab under Christopher J. Rossbach where I investigated heterogenous computing problems, specifically in the region of hardware accelerators (FPGAs) + graph analytics.

In my free time, I enjoy playing the electric bass (thank you to my amazing friends who purchased one for me), listening to music, running, and reading things on Wikipedia.

Feel free to reach out to if you want to discuss any of my posts or projects! This site was made with Jekyll.