Athish Rahul Rao is a Staff Software Engineer at Expedera, where he leads the development and evolution of the company’s software stack. Over the past five years, he has been a key contributor to core initiatives, including building custom LLM inference engines with proprietary scheduling algorithms, driving ISP-based computer vision pipelines for a major smartphone manufacturer, architecting distributed LLM inference systems across heterogeneous hardware and developing model-optimization techniques for neural network deployments at the edge. Prior to Expedera, Athish was a Software Engineer at Arista Networks. He holds a Master of Engineering from Cornell University and a Bachelor of Technology from Mahindra University.