Getting to Know B. Abhinav Ramana

Talent is LinkedIn’s number one operating priority and we have no shortage of talented individuals in technical roles across the company. These are the folks that create, build and maintain our platform, tools and features - as well as write the posts for this blog.

B. Abhinav Ramana is a software engineer in our Bangalore, India office. He is currently working on the latest search infrastructure of LinkedIn and various search verticals end-to-end, from backend to application layer.

Name: B. Abhinav Ramana
Position: Software Engineer
Background: Graduated from Birla Institute of Technology & Science (BITS), Pilani, majoring in Information Systems. I have worked on various projects on Android Mobile Application Development, Database Systems, Data Mining, Machine Learning and Object Oriented Programming to develop maintainable Apis using various design patterns during my internships and the university itself. LinkedIn is my first job and previously I was an intern at Amazon in their payments team.

What are your favorite things to do when you’re not at the office?
I love traveling different places and meeting new people. I like playing various action based computer games and badminton. Other than that, I read blogs about latest developments in technology.

What’s your favorite thing about working at LinkedIn?
Its fun working here. I have free conversations with my team and manager. The work culture is such that a group of friends are sitting together working on a project. The best thing about the work is ownership. Your work is your own work and you are held responsible for it, be it the credit for a good job or reprimand in case you wreck something up.

What do you do best at work?
Analysis of user intent, mentoring and slick at designing APIs and coding.

What do you love most about software engineering?
I want realize my ideas and software engineering helps me to implement it. Software engineering is like a sea, and I imbibe a drop of it everyday. Its amazing that so many open problems exist and I get to see different people tackle them differently. My work directly impacts LinkedIn's members and I like how my code helps them have smoother experience than before.

What tools do you use every day in your job?
I use mostly Java for the search development. Other than that, I use Python and Pig to write Map-reduce flows. The search platform I currently work on is Galene, which is built on top of Lucene.

What is the most challenging part of your job?
Search is an open problem. What may seem relevant to one set of our members, may not be that relevant to others. Personalized search, getting the intent of the members in as few characters as possible is challenging. We have to constantly re-iterate the recommendation process and make sure that our members always get relevant results by analysis of various user statistics. Besides going by statistical analysis, we have to put ourselves into shoes of users. Our team currently owns 9 search verticals (both typeahead and search results page). Improving relevance for all of them, migrating them on the latest search stack, blending of results in typeahead using machine learning model, and user intent extraction from as few keystrokes as possible are the some of the current challenges that our team is facing.