Rahul Ballal

Principal Engineer - Research and Development

Vizient Inc • Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Feb 2026 - Present

Architect - Membership Business Domain

CBus • Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Aug 2025 - Jan 2026

• Evaluated commercial and open source LLM models to improve marketing spend, leading the selection and implementation of a commercial offering over BYO and saving approximately 100k AUD.
• Authored and presented multiple solution design papers in the architecture forum, driving cross-organization alignment on membership domain solutions.
• Led a working group on AI-native software development, enabling automation of solution discovery, REST API testing, and browser testing.
• Mentored a team of 5 engineers on enterprise architecture principles and delivery practices, improving delivery velocity and architectural consistency.

Engineering Lead

Pepperstone • Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Mar 2024 - Jul 2025

• Founding member and engineering leader of the "Partnerships" value stream, responsible for defining the technical direction and delivery approach.
• Established ways of working, patterns, and practices for the initial team, creating a clear architectural and process foundation for future squads.
• Created and nurtured a highly collaborative environment across business verticals, improving stakeholder alignment and decision-making speed.
• Led the setup of a polyglot monorepo and CI/continuous delivery pipeline, enabling consistent, automated delivery across services and applications.
• Built a culture of ownership and accountability with a strong focus on continuous improvement and measurable outcomes.
• Delivered the value stream MVP within 6 months of joining, providing early business value and validating the technical approach.
• Regularly showcased progress through fortnightly demos to keep stakeholders informed, build confidence in the release plan, and surface early feedback.
• Remained hands-on with coding and code reviews across infrastructure (Terraform), HTTP APIs (Golang), frontend (React), and background workers (Golang, Node.js).
• Provided leadership for building an AI-driven translation tool on top of React i18n conventions, reducing manual localization effort.
• Led interviewing process improvements and hiring for new squads in the Asia region, raising the technical bar for new hires.
• Frequently represented the team in the company’s architecture review forum and empowered team members to present their designs for feedback.
• Managed the on-call roster and contributed to on-call support, helping ensure operational reliability.

Staff Engineer

SEEK • Melbourne, Victoria, Australia
Sep 2022 - Mar 2024

• Owned the engineering roadmap for the Job Posting product domain, aligning technical initiatives with product strategy and business outcomes.
• Took end-to-end ownership of the domain's GraphQL subgraph; made all GraphQL resolvers type-safe to increase confidence in the codebase and enable full testability through refactoring.
• Collaborated closely with Senior Staff Engineers to ensure architectural alignment across domains and regions.
• Provided planning and hands-on leadership during a company-wide initiative to merge data and services across multiple regions and acquisitions (including jobsdb in Thailand), contributing to safer rollouts and reduced integration risk.
• Identified parts of the application that were hard to support or extend and led targeted refactoring and observability improvements, reducing error rates and improving time to resolution for production issues.
• Designed and delivered SEEK-wide new hire training in GraphQL for a cohort of 10+ graduate engineers, including developing the course content.
• Co-founded the SEEK Bytes Engineering Podcast, providing engineers with visibility into enterprise software topics and helping to strengthen internal engineering culture.

Principal Engineer

PERSUIT™ • Melbourne, Australia
Aug 2019 - Sep 2022

• Built the first version of the continuous delivery pipeline, laying the foundation for more reliable, frequent releases.
• Set up and configured New Relic for observability, enabling better insight into system performance and production issues.
• Helped define and execute the technical roadmap to scale both the engineering team and the platform for increased user and data load.
• Actively built and maintained product features using GraphQL and React, staying close to the code while leading architectural decisions.
• Championed agile practices and coaching across squads, reinforcing iterative delivery and feedback loops.
• Practiced extensive pair programming to raise code quality, improve knowledge sharing, and onboard engineers more quickly.
• Mentored team members and led interviewing and hiring activities to grow a high-performing engineering team.
• Guided the team on effective ways of working in a remote setup, including communication and collaboration practices.
• Presented multiple technical talks on topics including Functional Programming, TypeScript, GraphQL, and Google Cloud messaging systems.

Lead Software Engineer

DiUS • Melbourne, Australia
Oct 2018 - Aug 2019

• Delivered backend GraphQL services for clients using TypeScript and Node.js, with PostgreSQL as the database and TypeORM for data access.

Senior Software Engineer

Shroogal • Melbourne, Australia
Mar 2018 - Oct 2018

• Built a financial advice platform for the Australian market using a modern serverless and single-page application stack.
• Implemented GraphQL APIs with AWS AppSync and AWS Lambda.
• Used DynamoDB for data persistence.
• Built the frontend using React.js and Next.js, with styling via emotion.sh (CSS-in-JS).
• Provisioned infrastructure in AWS using Serverless Framework and CloudFormation.

Senior Node.js Engineer

Domain • Sydney, New South Wales, Australia
Apr 2017 - Mar 2018

• Built next-generation applications for Domain.com.au using Node.js (Express, React.js).
• Used Amazon SQS for messaging and Amazon SNS and CloudWatch for notifications and metrics.
• Leveraged HashiCorp Nomad and Jenkins pipelines to deliver applications to AWS Cloud.

Principal Software Engineer

Wiredrive • Playa Vista
Mar 2016 - Mar 2017

Principal Software Engineer

Cornerstone OnDemand • Santa Monica, CA
Mar 2015 - Mar 2016

Senior Software Engineer

Kareo • Irvine, California, USA
Jun 2013 - Mar 2015

Senior Software Development Engineer

NEOGOV • El Segundo, CA
Mar 2012 - Jun 2013

Technical Lead - Contract

3M • Austin, Texas Area
Apr 2011 - May 2012

Sr. Web Developer - Contract

Bank of America • Agoura Hills, CA
Nov 2010 - Apr 2011

Lead Developer - Contract

3M • Tucson, Arizona Area
Jan 2009 - Oct 2010

Senior Developer - Contract

Intel Corporation • Chandler, AZ
Jan 2008 - Dec 2009

Programmer Analyst

First American Title • Santa Ana, CA
Jan 2006 - Dec 2008

Intern

Profit Concepts International • Long Beach, CA
Oct 2006 - Dec 2006

Entry Level Developer

Virinchi Solutions • Nagpur Area, India
Jan 2004 - Dec 2005