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Tharun Damera stands as a prime example of leadership fused with technical brilliance in the software engineering world. Currently a Staff Software Engineer at LinkedIn, Tharun Damera has built a career defined by driving innovation, orchestrating high-impact engineering efforts, and cultivating future-ready solutions. His work is not only shaping scalable tech infrastructure at leading firms but also setting a benchmark for excellence in AI integration, automation, and system optimization.
Tharun Damera’s academic journey began at one of India’s premier institutes—IIT Bombay, where he earned a B.Tech with Honours in Computer Science and Engineering. With a GPA of 8.74/10, his academic record is a testament to both his intellectual rigor and his passion for problem-solving. At IIT, he undertook challenging projects such as building a "Scarecrow Bot" that used laser pointers to deter birds and a Fantasy League system with complete database integration. His B.Tech project involved innovations in smart card operating systems under the mentorship of Prof. D. M. Dhamdhere—an experience that laid the conceptual and technical groundwork for his future contributions to systems architecture and security.
Tharun Damera’s career is marked by progressive responsibility and achievements across startups and tech giants. At Rover, he worked on optimizing email systems and built A/B testing frameworks that significantly boosted user engagement. His tenure at Revcontent saw him spearhead recommendation systems and eCPM prediction models using machine learning and real-time data analytics.
However, it is at LinkedIn that Tharun Damera’s impact has been most pronounced. Starting as a Senior Software Engineer in 2019, he quickly rose to become a Staff Engineer by 2023. At LinkedIn, he has led transformative initiatives like the Generative AI-driven Intake Agent (LinkedIn Hiring Assistant) that revolutionized hiring processes by automating recruiter workflows. His development of personalized ranking algorithms and advanced analytics for recommending a recruiter's next best action has elevated the functionality and relevance of LinkedIn’s hiring tools. He also spearheaded critical tracks of Project Ragnarok, driving the seamless migration of 14 B+ records from a monolithic Oracle-based backend to a scalable NoSQL database-backed microservices-based architecture, significantly reducing tech debt and operational complexity. From developing communication gateway tooling and infrastructure to reducing nearline feature onboarding time from months to days, Tharun Damera’s fingerprint is visible across LinkedIn’s communications and AI infrastructure.
Another collaborative and solution-oriented leader was Tharun Damera. He would foresee problems before they would arise, such as the platform dependency risks and the operation of AI sub-agent systems that needed to be smooth. Whereas the tech lead handles cross-functional teams having 10+ engineers, Tharun Damera ensured alignment across engineering, AI, infra, product, and design, thereby facilitating innovation in both vision and execution. In his Comms Debugging Tool project, implementing solutions directly for users' benefit was a priority- a tool providing real-time system insights that reduced troubleshooting time significantly.
Tharun Damera was among LinkedIn's 'Crush [in] It' award winners for showing exemplary teamwork and innovation in the Seamless Copy Testing project. He also received more than 40 Bravo recognitions from peers in areas such as "Dream Big" and "Act as One LinkedIn." His hack project Recruitron, which showcased the integration of global GAI systems into recruiting workflows, was declared one of the top projects in LinkedIn’s Global Hack Day. These awards serve as testaments to his impact and also showcase his knack for converting experimental ideas into innovations for the platform.
Tharun Damera has offered his primary contributions at an industrial level, but his foundational background in academia is tremendously relevant. Early systems for smart cards had architectural improvements proposed by him for actual security frameworks. The deep level of analysis and algorithmic thinking seen in his [IIT] work in projects like Gomoku AI simulations and sports fantasy league engines continues to influence his thinking in real-time data systems and ML pipeline development. Tharun Damera is the very image of the scientific-and-academic-esoteric personification versus industrialpraxis embodiment of delivering sophisticated scaled-out solutions that are data-driven and architecturally sound. Translating theoretical models into production-level systems, such as the interest graph pipeline at Revcontent and the intake agent framework at LinkedIn, is an ongoing process for him, implying that academic rigor still supports innovation in real-time processing, AI-driven automation, and infrastructure optimization.
Tharun Damera is currently focusing on intelligent automation, real-time relevance scoring, and scalable communications infrastructure; hence he is at the forefront of enterprise technology. With AI changing how work is being done, his systems are built to be intuitive, performant, and deep into workflow operations of the users. His technical foresight and leadership lead to a sustained effort for innovation that stands as a greater good rather than being just fashionable for a short moment. Moving forward, Tharun Damera stays the course in rethinking how companies apply data and AI toward operational efficiency and user satisfaction.
