Prashant Ramarao

VP Engineering, Head of Platform Engineering

Motive

Sep 2025 - Current (1 year)

Focused on engineering a highly scalable, resilient, and reliable system that empowers our product teams to innovate at speed.

Board Member

SimpleWorks

Oct 2022 - Current (3 years 11 months)

SimpleWorks is a CRM and AI solutions B2B SaaS startup. I advise them on business strategy, vision around AI in the product, and product growth strategy.

SVP of Engineering, Head of AI Engineering, Architecture and Open Source Office

Yahoo

Dec 2022 - Sep 2024 (1 year 10 months)

Led a team of AI/ML researchers and engineers globally, developing cutting-edge AI solutions for Yahoo’s core products (Yahoo Mail, Search, Finance, Sports, News) enhancing user experience for millions of users. My team also ran AI powered services for Knowledge Graph and content analysis. Additionally I was responsible for providing strategic leadership of the full application stack architecture for Yahoo products. Led a team of senior architects to drive technical excellence and innovation, which in turn shaped the technology strategy for a broader organization of ~1000 engineers. - Oversaw the AI research and development efforts - we launched 100+ ML and GenAI solutions reaching 750M monthly active users and integrated into products gen

VP of Engineering - Head of AI Engineering and Architecture

Yahoo

Sep 2021 - Dec 2022 (1 year 4 months)

Led a global team of AI / ML researchers, engineers, data scientists and architects with the responsibility of building solutions that are integrated into the entire yahoo product portfolio. - Restructured the research organization to better align with the GM led business units for a more streamlined resource allocation and accountability. - Orchestrated Yahoo Media’s cloud migration strategy to AWS and GCP, crafting a transformation roadmap that included a principles-driven decision framework, detailed cost models, and an architectural blueprint. This was a multi-million $$/year budget project to modernize and future-proof Yahoo’s media properties. Enabled over 150 component owners to execute cloud transformations in under two quarters, a

VP of Engineering - Head of Application Architecture

Verizon Media

Sep 2019 - Sep 2021 (2 years 1 month)

Served as Chief Architect for Yahoo consumer products, leading the technology vision and long-term architecture strategy across Yahoo’s product portfolio driving the technology roadmap for about 800 engineers globally. Balanced day-to-day execution with long-term strategic planning, navigating complex decisions and setting priorities that drove org-wide impact. - Pioneered key organization-wide initiatives, including ML adoption in 2019, training nearly 100 engineers - empowering multiple teams to build and deploy ML-powered features. - Spearheaded the transformation of Yahoo’s personalization platform, achieving an unprecedented 8000x speed boost in user profile creation and launched deep neural network (DNN)-based ranking models that drov

Sr Director of Engineering - Head of Yahoo Media Architecture

Yahoo

Apr 2015 - Sep 2019 (4 years 6 months)

Oversaw architecture and engineering efforts which involved large-scale infrastructure transformations including backend, frontend, and mobile, across multiple global engineering teams for Yahoo Finance, Yahoo Weather, Yahoo News and other media properties. - Headed a complete transformation of Yahoo Finance by implementing a microservice, cloud-ready infrastructure that revolutionized operability. Reduced mean time to recovery (MTTR) for critical finance time-series data from hours to minutes, cutting customer issues by over 40%. Streamlined the development stack from over ten frameworks and languages to Java, Node.js, and Python, accelerating feature development cycles from months to mere weeks. Performance optimizations delivered a 30% r

Principal Architect/Senior Principal Architect - Yahoo! Finance

Yahoo

Nov 2010 - Apr 2015 (4 years 6 months)

Served as the architect and tech lead for Yahoo finance (finance.yahoo.com) the #1 finance site in the world working with 50-80 engineers globally. As the lead was responsible for the technical approach to implement features, choice of technologies for the organization. - Bootstrapped key product innovations that reshaped user engagement on Yahoo Finance. Launched ML powered features such as stocks being watched/trending/popular stocks - this feature drove page visits up by 5%, Introduced Bitcoin on yahoo finance - this was recognized on twitter by investors as the first site to list bitcoin. - Pioneered Yahoo Finance’s CI/CD infrastructure, process and policies that transformed release cycles from legacy monthly updates to daily push mo

Principal Architect - Yahoo! Small Business

Yahoo

Sep 2007 - Oct 2010 (3 years 2 months)

Took on broader responsibilities as the principal engineer responsible for the design and development of several large projects for Yahoo! Web Hosting, Yahoo! Domains and Yahoo! Small Business Ordering systems. Some of the projects that I led were - Improve the resiliency of the products by designing and implementing a new hot-cold disaster recovery architecture for a stateful system - I worked on traffic serving infrastructure enhancements - Drove the redesign of ordering system - I was also the dedicated paranoid - responsible for security issues for all of Yahoo! Small Business.

Sr Technical Yahoo - Yahoo! Small Business

Yahoo

Jun 2005 - Sep 2007 (2 years 4 months)

Design and development of ecommerce infrastructure software for Yahoo Store. I worked on several large infrastructure initiatives to improve the resilience and operability of the Yahoo Store architecture. Some of the projects I worked on and led were - Performance optimization of the PHP based checkout system - Operability tools to migrate an ecommerce stores to balance load or capacity planning - Modernization of the store stack by replacing Lisp with C++ - Rearchitect some of the core components of the ecommerce platform to make it more resilient The technology stack was Apache, PHP, Perl, C++, Lisp, FreeBSD, TCP/IP, HTTP

Staff Engineer

Sun Microsystems

Jun 1997 - Jun 2005 (8 years 1 month)

Designed and Implemented the 1st version of uDAPL (RDMA over Infiniband) kernel + user land drivers for Solaris. Designed for HPC and Large scale distributed databases. Designed and implemented high performance solaris/unix networking kernel modules. Was a tech lead in the Sun Cluster transport and networking team. I also designed and implemented libraries + kernel interconnect software for other proprietary high speed interconnect in Solaris. As part of this role I partnered with teams building Oracle RAC, Siemens and other Sun Cluster customers.

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