I am a Senior Software Engineer at Google. I work on network traffic management for Google’s wide-area network (WAN). Specifically, I work in the Bandwidth Enforcer team, which computes and enforces bandwidth allocations on Google’s WAN to meet various business policies.

My research interests are in wide-area networking, congestion control, software-defined networks and programmable networks. I am excited about developing large-scale, simple, and practical systems, which are grounded in theory.

Prior to joining Google in 2019, I received a Ph.D. in Computer Science from Stanford University 🌲, where I was advised by Professor Nick McKeown. During my Ph.D., I explored a class of proactive congestion control algorithms for the Internet and datacenters, where network switches co-ordinate to rapidly figure out how to share bandwidth among different applications.
Before that, I received my B.S.E. in Computer Science from Princeton University 🐅, where I discovered computer science research, and I was fortunate to be advised by Professors Jennifer Rexford, Moses Charikar and Christiane Fellbaum. At Princeton, I developed techniques to measure Internet traffic at line rate in hardware, and worked to improve WordNet, a lexical database of English widely used in computational linguistics.

Service

Honors

Publications

(* indicates that I was the lead student on this project)

Ph.D. Thesis

Invited Talks

  • Dagstuhl Seminar 16281 on Network Latency Control in Data Centres in July, 2016.
    (Slides in .pdf)
  • NSF Algorithms in the Field (AiTF) Workshop on Algorithms for Software-Defined Networking in June, 2016.
    (Talk) (Slides in .pptx)
  • MSR Student Summit on Mobility, Systems, and Networking in January, 2016.
    (Slides in .pptx)

Contact

  • You can e-mail me at lavanyaj (at) cs (dot) stanford (dot) edu or lav (at) google (dot) com.
  • You can also find me on LinkedIn, GitHub, and Bitbucket.

Personal

  • Advice on thriving at an American college as an international student (Blog post)
  • Favorite writing samples from the Daily Princetonian: On People (John Dabiri, Merrily Baker), On Careers (Firefighting, Religious) (Crazy fact: you can go all the way back to archives from 1892)
  • My first name is pronounced like “Lavinia” and is a Sanskrit word, which means “grace” or “beauty”. My last name is pronounced like “Joe’s”, and has its origins in the Bible.