UpLevel.io / First-of-its-kind Technical Interview-prep Summit

Yannis Minadakis, currently works as a Senior Engineering Manager at Google. With over 15 years of industry experience, he has worked at companies such as Apple, Bloomberg, Microsoft, Intel, and AMD.

As a Senior Engineering Manager at Apple, he built the team that shipped a set of Siri Suggestions features focused on text traction from private messaging on-device.

At Intel, Yannis worked on optimizing AAA video games to scale in both CPU and GPU and led a team to port Call of Duty 4 to Larrabee.

When Yannis isn’t leading the Stadia Graphics Organization at Google, he is an advisor at interviewing.io, Scopic Software, and Interview Kickstart.

Yannis is passionate about creating unique business and customer value while growing high-performance teams driven to solve technically challenging problems.

Nikola’s tech industry experience includes tenures at two companies acquired by tech giants.

At Room 77, which was acquired by Google in 2014, he was a part of the engineering team that worked on hotel search technology.

He also worked at Refdash, a marketplace that offered an efficient, transparent, and less stressful way to conduct  job searches. Refdash was acquired by Facebook in 2018.

Having worked at two companies with technologies that caught the attention of two tech giants like Google and Facebook is impressive in and of itself.

Nikola holds a B.S. in Economics, a B.S. in Electrical Engineering and Computer science, and a Master of Engineering in Computer Science from MIT.

Harshit is Head of Engineering at Amazon Web Services(AWS) currently focusing on Internet of Things (IoT) services.

Harshit has over 20+ years of professional experience leading multi-disciplinary teams such as engineering, product management, UX designers and DevOps.

After earning an M.S. in Computer Engineering from Georgia Institute of Technology, Harshit entered the workforce as a software engineer and built his way up in the industry assuming leadership roles at various companies including Microsoft, HPE Helion, Applied Materials and a few startups.

Harshit also offers mentorship at various organizations such as Turazo, which helps young professionals connect with employees at their dream companies, and Everwise, under its Women Entering & Staying in Tech (WEST) program.

Harshit is passionate about building products that delight customers and always strives for innovation.

Soham Mehta is a co-founder at Interview Kickstart.

Before founding Interview Kickstart, Soham served as the first Director of Engineering at Box. He also worked at Microsoft and Ebay.

Soham has hired hundreds of engineers and engineering managers in Silicon Valley, coached thousands more, and is one of the foremost thinkers on technical interviews.

As a co-founder of Interview Kickstart, Soham drives the development of interview prep programs that prepare engineers for the toughest tech interviews by helping them become better engineers.

Tasneem Minadakis is Director of Engineering at Google.

She has over 18 years of professional experience building quality products and high performing teams. Through the course of her career, she has worked on Windows, Surface, Bing, Ads, Growth and Compliance.

She’s currently responsible for brands in Google Shopping, focused on increasing engagement and discovery. She is known to foster an open and collaborative work environment.  She believes in being open to change and self-analytical.

Tasneem has led Women in Tech D&I groups across the companies she has worked at. Currently, she is the lead for Google’s Women @ EMEA. She is also an advisor at various startups on product strategy and roadmaps.

Technical leader. Entrepreneur. Innovator.

Murali works as a Principal Software Engineering Manager on Microsoft’s Azure Networking team. At Microsoft, Murali is one of the founding engineers responsible for shipping V1s of Microsoft Azure and Window Server products.

He has also been a part of engineering teams at Box and co-founded 500 Miles, where he led the architecture of large-scale data platforms and mobile/web apps.

Besides all the innovative work he does at Microsoft, Murali mentors students at Interview Kickstart to help them achieve their goal of upleveling their careers.

Murali earned an M.S. in Computer Science from The University of Minnesota-Twin Cities and a B.E. in Computer Science and Engineering from Osmania University.

A Software Engineering Manager at LinkedIn, Adrian worked his way up the ranks after joining the organization as a Senior Software Engineer.

He has experience working in the internet industry as both an individual contributor and a manager.

Adrian is skilled in tools and technologies such as JavaScript, Spring, UML, and Python.

Besides his experience working at large companies, Adrian also has experience working at a startup, Flaptor.

Adrian holds a M.S. and a B.S. degree from  the Universidad Argentina de la Empresa.

Manoj is a Software Engineer at Facebook and an Instructor at Interview Kickstart.

At Facebook, Manoj works on Distributed Machine Learning, Deep Learning, PyTorch, Caffe2, and other AI-related processes on a large scale. 

Manoj has contributed to many publications such as “Noncollective Communicator Creation in MPI” and “An Efficient Hardware-Software Approach to Network Fault Tolerance with InfiniBand”.

As an instructor at Interview Kickstart, Manoj teaches a variety of topics, including Dynamic Programming, Recursion and Backtracking, and Sorting.

Manoj’s association with Interview Kickstart (IK), began when he enrolled for a course at IK with the aim of learning how to crack the toughest tech interviews at top-tier companies. Manoj achieved this goal when he joined Facebook as a Software Engineer. Inspired by his own success, Manoj joined the IK team to help other aspiring engineers achieve their goal of joining a company of their dreams, just like he did.

Manoj’s positive attitude and clarity of instruction makes his classes  much sought-after sessions.

Shawn began his journey in the tech industry as a Lab TA for the Western Washington University, where he earned his B.S. in Computer Science.

Shawn worked for a consulting firm and a number of  startups before securing his current role as a Software Engineer at Google.

He is well-versed in C#, Python, and Java. Shawn has experience working on high throughput ETL systems, on-prem monolith to cloud base microservice transitions, and rewriting API functionality to provide parity between different user markets.

Having achieved career success as a former student of Interview Kickstart, Shawn strongly believes in  the importance of structured interview preparation in order  to uplevel careers.

Ryan lives by Muhammad Ali’s famous quote ‘Impossible is nothing. As a  co-founder of Interview Kickstart, Ryan is passionate about helping engineers reach their full potential.

Before founding Interview Kickstart, Ryan served as  Entrepreneur -In-Residence at Accel Partners, a top-tier, Valley-based venture capital firm.

Prior to joining Accel, Ryan was the CEO of a fast-growing e-commerce company and worked in the field of consulting across various geographies.

Over the course of his career, he has hired numerous candidates for diverse roles.

Ryan enjoys coaching and is deeply passionate about helping people get the best out of themselves.

Joey is a technical leader in the Machine Learning (ML) team at Snap Inc. 

Joey's work centers on applying machine learning techniques to recommendation and personalization tasks. 

He is well-versed in GoLang, Java, and Python. 

He has held engineering positions at Scaled Inference and Sift in the past.

Joey holds a B.S. in Computer Science from The Carnegie Mellon University.

Adept at leading large teams and multi-tasking, Vineet has held many leadership positions over the span of his career.  He worked as Team Lead at Bloomberg LP and Software Development Manager at Shopbop. He is currently a  Software development manager at Amazon.

Vineet plans to continue building expertise in the technology domain in both technical and managerial functions.

At Shopbop, a subsidiary of Amazon, he managed tech teams in different verticals such as Marketing, Buying, Planning, and Shopping Experience.

Vineet graduated from the Vishwakarma Institute of Technology and Savitribai Phule Pune University with a Bachelor’s degree in Computer Engineering. He continued his education at the Binghamton University, where he earned a Masters degree in Computer Science. Vineet also holds an MBA in General Management from  New York University’s Stern School of Business.

Zhuang is an Engineering Manager at Google. He held the same position at Uber where he worked before transitioning to Google.

Zhuang enrolled at Interview Kickstart back in 2015 with the goal of upleveling his career by cracking the toughest interviews at top tech companies. After successfully achieving his goal,  Zhuang decided to give back to Interview Kickstart by joining the team as a technical mentor. 

Zhuang’s educational background includes undertaking a Harvard Business School Executive Education program, an M.S. in Information Technology in eBiz Technology from Carnegie Mellon University, and a Bachelor’s degree in Software Engineering from Huazhong University of Science and Technology. 

He enjoys building innovative software and collaborating with like-minded people.

With over 20 years of experience as an engineering leader, Vivek currently leads LinkedIn's Feed Infrastructure team as its Director of Engineering.

In the past, Vivek has managed large teams comprising 40+ members and launched initiatives at Alphonso Inc., Chartboost, and Yahoo.

Vivek has a deep understanding of data management platforms, advertising, and data domains.

Vivek understands the importance of effective interview preparation being an Interview Kickstart alumnus turned Interview Kickstart tech mentor.

Vivek is known to be a driven, hard-working individual, focused on delivering results.

He graduated from Bharathiar University with a B.S. degree in Electrical Engineering.

As the Head of Career Coaching at Interview Kickstart, Nick Camilleri has helped more than 3,000 software engineers land their dream jobs in tech. 

Growing up in Mountain View, CA, Nick was excited to start his career as a technical recruiter, helping local tech companies like Google and Apple grow.

He then made his way to LinkedIn where he served as part of the hiring committee that oversaw 200+ SWE hires.

Since then, he has had the pleasure of speaking at universities like Stanford University, Santa Clara University, SJSU, UOP, and UC Davis on topics such as professional communication, career development, and entrepreneurship.

Niloy is the co-founder and chief architect of Confluera where he built a large-scale online security platform. His start-up is touted to be one of twelve hot cybersecurity startups to watch for in 2020. He is also an official member of Forbes’ Technology Council, an invitation-only community of leading CIOs, CTOs, and technology executives.

Niloy was a part of LinkedIn’s Distributed Data Systems team, where he worked on Espresso, LinkedIn’s homegrown NoSQL document-oriented data store that handles the live site’s 600 million members.

Before LinkedIn, Niloy worked at Oracle as one of the primary architects of its real-time in-memory columnar analytics offering.

During this transition, Niloy enrolled at Interview Kickstart and is a prime example of an engineer who, despite his many accomplishments, still believed in the importance of  effective interview preparation.

Niloy is a tech coach and mentor at Interview Kickstart and  is passionate about teaching and coaching software professionals in all aspects of scalable systems.

Niloy has a strong computer science background with a B. Tech. from IIT and an M.S. degree from MIT.

Lathendra is passionate about Distributed Computing and Big Data Technology Stack. He has worked at leading companies such as Uber, Walmart Labs, and Microsoft, and is currently a Senior Data Engineer at tech giant Google.

He has over 15 years of Software Engineering experience, with 10+ years of architecting and designing Big Data Lakes, scalable data processing systems and pipelines, and homegrown ETL frameworks.

Lathendra is well-versed in Python, Core Java, and C#.

He earned a bachelor’s degree from Andhra University. He also  holds licenses and certifications fromHarvard University, Coursera, and Microsoft.

Lathendra enrolled as a student at Interview Kickstart in 2016 and has since espoused the need for effective, structured preparations to succeed at tech interviews to uplevel a career.

Check out his LinkedIn profile to learn more: https://www.linkedin.com/in/lathendra/

Being a chemical engineer, Safir hailed  from a non-computer science/coding background. With dedication and persistent effort, he broke into the tech industry and found success at Facebook as a Machine Learning (ML) Software Engineer.

Before joining the ML team, Safir worked on  developing an application for semiconductor yield analysis. He also led scientific research on enabling the manufacture of innovative device architectures as a data scientist at Intel. He leveraged his knowledge on predictive modeling, statistics, data mining and other data analysis techniques to collect, explore, and extract insights from structure and unstructured data.

Safir graduated from John Hopkins University with a Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Chemical and Biomolecular Engineering, and earned a dual degree (Masters and Bachelors) in Chemical Engineering from IIT Bombay.

Hien currently works at Doordash as the Head of Machine Learning (ML) Infrastructure. He leads a team that is building the foundational ML infrastructure to improve the speed and iteration of applying ML at Doordash.

He possesses over 20 years of experience designing and developing web applications, big data infrastructure, and applications at Silicon Valley companies like LinkedIn, Uber and Netflix.

Having spoken at multiple engagements such as QCon, Seattle Data Day, and ArchSummit, Hien is a natural when it comes to public speaking.

He is a part-time instructor at UCSC Extension, where he teaches the Apache Spark with Scala course, Design Patterns, and Java Comprehensive. Hien holds a B.S. in Electrical Engineering from the University of Washington and an M.S. in Software Engineering from San Jose State University.

Omkar is Head of Curriculum and Teaching at Interview Kickstart.

Omkar drives the creation of high-quality interview prep content for software engineers, blending the theoretical rigor of a university course with the practical coding patterns needed for technical interviews.

He has over 11 years of experience in the tech industry and particularly enjoys working with Edtech startups.

Omkar was one of the primary architects of the knowledge graph technology at Kosmix, a startup acquired by Walmart to form WalmartLabs. As Principal Engineer at WalmartLabs, Omkar worked on knowledge graphs, information retrieval and recommendation systems. During this time he also, simultaneously, pursued various educational interests.

Omkar co-founded The Young Socratics, an education company which released Odyssey, a puzzle-adventure video game title that teaches astronomy and physics using a historical invention-based approach.

He holds a Ph.D. and M.S. in Computer Science from Stanford University and an undergraduate degree in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Delhi.

Rohit has over 20 years of experience in the tech industry. During his tenure at Mahindra Satyam, Rohit worked as a test consultant at Google Inc. and eventually became an official ‘’Googler.

While at the tech giant, Rohit worked in multiple roles such as a Software Test Engineer, Senior Software Test Engineer, and is currently a Staff Software Test Engineer. Rohit is often recognised by his coworkers for his  deep technical knowledge, excellent people management skills, commitment, diligence, and result-oriented approach to tasks..

Rohit earned a Bachelor and Master of Computer Applications degree in Computer Science at Saurashtra University.