Srivatsa Kamballa - Software Engineer

Hi. I'm

A Software Engineer who breaks what he builds.

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Tirupati → Bangalore → Chicago
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srivatsa@chicago: ~/portfolio

$ she asked how much I love her ❤️❓🎺

me: "O(n)."

she asked what that means.

me: "depends on how many problems you give me." 😭

Projects

Open Source

merged

open

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major projects

BerriAI/litellm #31725+1039 −25

Mergedapproved by a maintainer

Shipped time-based off-peak pricing in the cost engine

A feature on LiteLLM's core cost-calculation path: models declare UTC windows and discounted rates, and the calculator picks the rate by time of day, fully backward compatible. During review I caught an equal-ended window silently billing standard rates around the clock and pinned it with a regression test; when the schema needed day-of-week, I escalated to maintainers rather than guess, and a core maintainer built it on my branch and merged. +1,039 / -25 across 8 files.

BerriAI/litellm #37407

Merged

Fixed double-billing on overlapping cached and image tokens

Cost calculation counted tokens twice when cached and image tokens overlapped, inflating charges on multimodal requests. I corrected the overlap accounting with regression tests.

run-llama/llama_index #22773

Merged

Stopped a postprocessor crashing on missing metadata

A node postprocessor raised when a node's metadata was None instead of a dict, crashing retrieval on otherwise-valid inputs. I guarded the None case with a regression test.

run-llama/llama_index #22133+68 −9

Merged

Fixed silent data loss in the ingestion core

In IngestionPipeline upserts, nodes were keyed by document id in a dict, so every chunk of a document except the last was silently dropped, never embedded or stored. I fixed both the sync and async paths with regression tests for each.

pydantic/pydantic #13374+9 −0

Mergedapproved by a maintainer

Stopped a JSON schema config being silently dropped

When an Annotated field combined a dict json_schema_extra with a callable one, Pydantic warned the callable would be ignored, then did the opposite: it dropped the dict and could crash schema generation. I made the dict win as documented and added a regression test. Approved by a core maintainer.

BerriAI/litellm #30764+59 −5

Merged

Stopped short secrets leaking into logs

SensitiveDataMasker returned any secret of 8 characters or fewer verbatim, leaking short redis passwords, API keys, and tokens into logs and the admin UI. I made short values mask by default, audited all 16 call sites, and added regression tests.

BerriAI/litellm #29693+36 −2

Merged

Fixed a 10x cost-tracking error

amazon.titan-embed-text-v2 was priced ten times too high in the cost maps, inflating everyone's budget reports. I verified the number against AWS Bedrock pricing and fixed the primary and backup maps in sync so they would not drift apart again.

deepset-ai/haystack #11670+27 −0

Merged

Silenced noisy logs on empty inputs

HTMLToDocument dumped ERROR lines on empty ByteStream inputs because lxml logs its parse failures internally rather than raising. I skipped empty streams before extraction, with a regression test.

deepset-ai/haystack #11543

Merged

Documented the OpenSearch SQL retriever

Authored the missing documentation page for Haystack's OpenSearchSQLRetriever, with configuration and query examples so the component is usable straight from the docs.

deepset-ai/haystack #11494

Merged

Documented the Elasticsearch SQL retriever

Authored the documentation page for Haystack's ElasticsearchSQLRetriever, covering setup and query patterns.

BerriAI/litellm #38164

Open

Fixing a cost-based routing tie that ignores cache-read price

Cost-based routing ignored cache_read_input_token_cost, so deployments with equal input and output price tied and list order decided the winner, even where cache-read pricing differs 10x. Open, CI green, Greptile 5/5.

BerriAI/litellm #37747

Open

Fixing a request that permanently blanks a model's pricing

A single malformed request could permanently blank a model's pricing in /v2/model/info for the whole process. Open, CI green, 100% patch coverage.

stanfordnlp/dspy #9942+24 −2

Open

Fixed value corruption in the chat parser

In ChatAdapter.parse, the field-header regex matched the stripped line but sliced the unstripped one, leaking stray marker characters into parsed values on indented headers. I aligned the match and the slice with regression tests. Open and under review.

Writing

Failing safe and failing silently are the same mechanism

Aug 18, 2026

A component I built so it could never break the main path turned out to be able to hide its own bugs. The two properties arrive together, and separating them took a per-request connection and a real socket.

Aug 18, 2026

rag-redteam cover: injection is a pipeline problem, not a model one.

RAG injection is a pipeline problem, not a model problem

Jul 2, 2026

I built rag-redteam to test the pipeline that turns untrusted documents into trusted context. A frontier-model upgrade did not fix injection. That is the whole point.

Jul 2, 2026

When to stop fuzzing: a Bayesian answer to a wall-clock question.

When is it actually safe to stop fuzzing?

Jun 18, 2026

Most fuzzing campaigns stop on a wall-clock budget and a shrug. PSBayes estimates the residual risk you are actually carrying, per seed.

Jun 18, 2026

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Experience

Research Specialist • University of Illinois Chicago

Aug 2026 - Present • Chicago, IL

Building a system that translates C to Rust and validates each port with differential fuzzing across CRUST-bench and DARPA TRACTOR. First author on PSBayes, a Bayesian estimator of residual fuzzing risk built on Google FuzzBench and LLVM. Paper under submission.

IT Technical Associate • University of Illinois Chicago

Sep 2024 - May 2026 • Chicago, IL

Automated cloud and HPC infrastructure with Terraform and Ansible, taking provisioning from 4 hours to 45 minutes, and led 5+ engineers building MetARAG, a GPU-accelerated RAG platform for CCC Intelligent Solutions.

Software Engineer • Mu Sigma

May 2023 - Jun 2024 • Bangalore, India

Wrote the Python modules that turn demand, inventory and capacity into daily build plans for 2 US plants of a global medical-technology manufacturer, and automated weekly data prep from 6 hours to under 2.

Education

Master of Science, Computer Science • University of Illinois Chicago

Aug 2024 - May 2026 • Chicago, IL

GPA 3.88 / 4.00

B.Tech, Computer Science (AI Specialization) • Jain University

2020 - 2024 • Bangalore, India

GPA 3.91 / 4.00

Certifications, Patent & Research

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

Amazon Web Services · Issued 2026

Designing distributed, cost-optimized, and resilient systems on AWS: VPC and IAM, auto-scaling, and observability.

Book Issue Management System for Libraries

Patent No. 202341071153 · Intellectual Property India · Nov 2023

Co-invented an AI-enabled camera and RFID system for automated library book issuance, return, and access control.

PSBayes: Bayesian Residual-Risk for Fuzzing

First-authored paper · under submission

A per-seed Beta-posterior estimator of the undiscovered risk left in a fuzzing campaign, evaluated across 8 FuzzBench benchmarks and 18,861 discovery rounds.

Tirupati → Bangalore → Chicago

Last Played

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Activity

rag-redteam | Open-Source RAG Security Tool

kubemend | Kubernetes Remediation Tool

MetARAG | Document Intelligence Platform

ECI Pipeline | Android Risk Intelligence

Chain-of-Thought on CLEVR

End-to-End DevSecOps EKS Platform

Movie Recommendation | MLOps Lifecycle

Counterfactual Fact Verification

Shipped time-based off-peak pricing in the cost engine

Fixed double-billing on overlapping cached and image tokens

Stopped a postprocessor crashing on missing metadata

Fixed silent data loss in the ingestion core

Stopped a JSON schema config being silently dropped

Stopped short secrets leaking into logs

Fixed a 10x cost-tracking error

Silenced noisy logs on empty inputs

Documented the OpenSearch SQL retriever

Documented the Elasticsearch SQL retriever

Fixing a cost-based routing tie that ignores cache-read price

Fixing a request that permanently blanks a model's pricing

Fixed value corruption in the chat parser

Failing safe and failing silently are the same mechanism

RAG injection is a pipeline problem, not a model problem

When is it actually safe to stop fuzzing?