About speaker

Mallika Rao is a senior engineering leader focused on building large-scale AI and distributed systems. She currently leads platform and foundations engineering at Zocdoc, where her teams enable experimentation, self-serve infrastructure, and large-scale content workflows powering product innovation.

Prior to Zocdoc, Mallika was an engineering leader at places like Netflix, Walmart, Twitter, where she worked on highly scaled search, personalization, recommendation systems Her work sits at the intersection of AI systems, platform engineering, reliability, and organizational design. She is particularly interested in how teams evolve from traditional distributed systems toward AI-native and agentic architectures, and how evaluation, observability, and human-centered system design become critical in that transition.

Mallika is also a speaker and writer on engineering leadership, AI infrastructure, and systems thinking, with talks at conferences including QCon AI.