Ritesh Maheshwari

“Ritesh was my direct manager when I joined LinkedIn, and was my manager for the majority of my time there (before he became my skip level). I hope to work with him again. I learned so much from him, both in terms of how to successfully manage a team, and how I could progress through my own career. I joined LinkedIn as a staff engineer, coming from a role as a staff engineer at a much smaller company. Ritesh guided me through this transition, helping me understand the practical differences I’d find between the roles and how to ensure I succeeded. I know it wasn’t just me that experienced his help and guidance. Others on the team, and teams around us, all expressed gratitude and admiration for Ritesh. He ran the team with trust, honesty, transparency, and care. He trusted us to do our best work, and only would step in when he could help (he never micro managed). When the company went through transitory times he’d be as transparent with us as possible, and raised our questions and concerns up to the higher levels. And for care, he always made an effort to make sure everyone was included, focused on team morale, celebrated the wins of Individual Contributors, and fostered an environment where our team all felt comfortable being ourselves. On a purely technical level, Ritesh has an impressive background in networking and performance (both research and engineering), is able to enter and learn domains quickly (as an example, he became one of the best people to brainstorm ideas for improving media across the company almost immediately after joining the media team), and has a great eye for both prioritization based on needs of the team and company, and for calling out potential risks or better options for engineered solutions. With Ritesh's guidance and leadership, the media team went from a lack of trustworthy data to a reliable data pipeline, and made significant impact to our Quality of Experience metrics, improving our success rates (10+ percentage points improvement), performance (over 75% reduction in TTFF), and perceived quality (from no measurement to an increasing quality score). I’m happy to have the chance to refer Ritesh, and think he’d be a fantastic member of any company he joins.”

“Ritesh is a really smart engineer with both breadth and depth of technical skills. He has a great attitude and works well with cross functional teams. During my work with him on Site Speed improvements, he quickly grew from being one of the most productive engineers in the team to being a influential leader that others depended on and looked up to. He was instrumental in creating the strategy and tools ecosystem for measurements, improvements and visibility for LinkedIn apps and pages velocity. He worked closely with data sciences to build a model to inform us on the most optimal point of presence center locations around the world. He played an important role in creation of small footprint network accelerators. Ritesh's work in this area has had a pretty significant positive impact on LinkedIn.”