Featured Research Engineer - Tej Kasturi

Tej Kasturi was three years old when he first came to live in the U.S. “My earliest memory was getting off a plane in Texas with my mom,” recalls Kasturi. At the time, his father was working on his doctorate at Texas Tech in Lubbock. Four years later, the family moved to Pennsylvania when his father accepted a teaching position at Penn State’s Department of Electrical Engineering.

Kasturi toyed around with the idea of becoming a politician when he was young. But he decided he wasn’t really into politics. “I thought I would end up as a politician, but I think it’s too much pressure,” he said. After attending high school in Pennsylvania, Kasturi made the move out West to Pasadena to attend the California Institute of Technology (Caltech).

He first aspired to become an electrical engineer. “It was a trendy major – about one third of all freshmen declared it as their major,” he said. But a stringent “weeding out” process came into play through brutal coursework to test the diligence of the proclaimed electrical engineering majors. “Most of them dropped out by junior year, “said Kasturi. He was one of them. He switched his major to computer engineering when he realized his fascination with computers – “all the way from hardware to high level software” and how they work. He also enjoyed programming a lot more than the lab work he did in electrical engineering.

After graduating from Caltech in 1997, he worked as a computer programmer for a small financial company called First Quadrant – a company that took a quantitative approach to managing money for large pension funds. “I learned a lot about financial markets there,” he said.

After 2 ½ years at First Quadrant, he was recruited by publishing software giant Quark and moved to Denver to assume his post. Unfortunately, the company shipped their operations to India and laid off the entire team in Denver, so Kasturi switched gears and joined a startup in telecommunications as a developer and eventually became its chief software architect. Ailing economic times drove the startup to shut down in 2003 – the year that ultimately led to life with Yahoo! for Kasturi.

A friend from college who also worked with Kasturi at First Quadrant recruited him at Overture for a software engineering position. Between the time that Kasturi interviewed for the position and his acceptance, Overture was acquired by Yahoo! On January 1, 2004, 3 months after his first day of work at Overture, Kasturi officially became a Yahoo!.

Kasturi now works on designing next-generation search with a core group of scientists and research engineers. His current projects include the Correlator demo with Yahoo! Research Barcelona. He is also working on another information retrieval project, the Context Demo, which searches the Internet based on the user’s intent. The project is led by researcher Debora Donato. He previously worked with the microeconomics group on the Tech Buzz Game and Yootles.

Why Yahoo!? “I like the people,” said Kasturi. “I also like the exposure to a wide variety of projects – I’m not working on the same field day in and day out.” He was recently promoted to Principal Research Engineer and hopes to continue his path in research engineering – perhaps becoming a team lead one day. He happily admits that Yahoo! Research offers it all for him: working on projects from the ground up gives it a startup feel, yet he enjoys the security of an established company within an environment that is academic.

“I just celebrated my 5-year anniversary with the company,” he said. “I think I’m going to be around for a while.”