Balaji Muthazhagan Thirugnana Muthuvelan

Balaji Muthazhagan is a Software Engineer on Pinterest's Ads Serving Platform, where he designs and maintains low-latency infrastructure processing billions of ad requests daily across 30+ markets. He owns critical components across the full serving stack - request validation, candidate retrieval, eligibility filtering, auction mechanics, multi-stage ML ranking, and ad selection. Balaji drives architectural improvements to core serving systems, enables new advertiser products, and supports first-party and third-party demand integration for Pinterest's multi-billion dollar ads business. Previously, Balaji was a Senior Software Engineer at Arcesium (D.E. Shaw), where he architected scalable MLOps platforms and delivered systems for high-volume financial computation and trading workflows. He holds an M.S. in Computer Science (AI specialization) from UC San Diego and a B.E. from PSG College of Technology (university Gold Medal). His research includes work on continual learning algorithms at the Bazhenov Lab, UCSD. balajimuthazhagan.com