Manikanta Inugurthi

Senior Software Engineer with 7+ years of experience building and scaling backend and platform systems. Currently working on machine translation and speech platforms at Microsoft.

Work Experience

• Contributing to backend services in large-scale text-to-speech systems, focusing on language coverage, pronunciation quality, and production readiness.

• Led development of Adaptive Custom Translator, enabling style adaptation with as few as 150 sentence pairs, compared to ~10,000 sentences required by the existing Custom Translator, while preserving translation quality.
• Drove the project end‑to‑end: problem definition, research prototyping, system design, production rollout, and post‑launch optimization.
• Designed shared multilingual model infrastructure, reducing translation runtime memory usage by 40% and improving fleet‑wide efficiency.
• Collaborated closely with applied scientists, product managers, and partner teams to align technical trade‑offs with customer needs.

• Owned and maintained an internal tool that enables translation researchers to train, test, and deploy machine translation models.
• Consolidated fragmented model quality metrics into a single evaluation pipeline and report, significantly improving decision‑making speed for researchers.
• Led backend API redesign and React‑based frontend migration of a .NET portal, achieving a 10× performance improvement and better scalability.
• Enhanced Custom Translator with the latest translation model recipe (+8 BLEU points) and Neural Phrase Fix (+3 BLEU points), enabling customers to achieve domain-specific accuracy.

• Spearheaded multiple projects to revamp legacy software systems and successfully onboarded them to the Compliance development team’s product platform.
• Owned the full development lifecycle, from requirements gathering and design to deployment and production support.
• Partnered with stakeholders to propose and deliver new product capabilities.
• Improved system performance by 25% through profiling, optimization, and architectural improvements.

• Implemented strategies to reduce operational toil.
• Improved system stability, reducing incidents by 60%+.
• Cut support costs by 50% across multiple projects.

• Restructured the RIL layer of Android.
• Achieved Professional Level Grade in Samsung’s Software Certification Test within two months of joining.

• Built integrations using Retrofit and OkHttpClient.
• Integrated Firebase for push notifications.

Education and Certifications

• B.E. Information Technology, Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra, India. 2014–2018

Technologies and Languages

• Programming Languages: Java, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, C#
• Frontend: React, modern web architectures
• Infrastructure & DevOps: Docker, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Git
• Data & Storage: MySQL

Projects, Awards and Volunteer Work

• Rakshak - An end-to-end encrypted email client using IMAP, SMTP with AES and RSA algorithms
• Toaster - A lightweight android library for showing some beautiful toasts which enhances user experience
• Smart India Hackathon: 2nd Prize (College Representative).
• Executive member, IET Student Chapter, BIT Mesra — conducted sessions on Coding, Data Structures, and Algorithms.