Rootul Patel
Engineering at Celestia · ex-Palantir · ex-AWS
Engineering Manager leading Celestia's Protocol team, with 10 years of distributed systems experience and deep IC roots in consensus protocols and Go. Shipped seven consensus-breaking upgrades to live mainnet and now drive team-level reliability, performance, and scale objectives. Previously built Ethereum infrastructure at AWS and data platforms at Palantir.
Experience
Celestia
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Engineering Manager
Mar 2026 — Present
- Lead an 8-person team (10 reports including two on loan to adjacent team) owning reliability, performance, and scale for the Celestia protocol
- Defined and now drive execution against Q2 OKRs spanning network reliability, protocol performance, and scale targets
Celestia
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Team Lead
Dec 2025 — Mar 2026
- Led a 4-person team owning the Celestia consensus layer
Celestia
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Senior Software Engineer
Jul 2022 — Dec 2025
- Led the first consensus layer upgrade (v2.0.0), establishing the upgrade framework used by all subsequent network upgrades
- Authored 888 and reviewed 1,956 merged pull requests across celestia-app and celestia-core
Amazon Web Services
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Software Development Engineer II
Jun 2020 — Apr 2022
- Expanded Ethereum support for Amazon Managed Blockchain to 6 AWS regions
- Recognized as employee of the month 3 times in less than 2 years (team of ~20 engineers)
- Saved our team $19K+ per month by optimizing Kinesis usage
Palantir
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Software Engineer
Aug 2016 — May 2020
- Maintained Foundry Reports, a cross-platform dashboarding application deployed to hundreds of enterprise organizations
- Developed Foundry Data Connection application that connected to external databases and systems to enable automated data pipelines into Foundry
- Awarded patents: Tools for chemical manufacturing and Automated risk visualization
Education
Boston College · Carroll School of Management
B.S. in Management — Computer Science & Information Systems
Sep 2012 — May 2016
Dean's Letter of Commendation · Cum Laude · Co-president, Computer Science Society
Skills
Languages
Go · Rust · TypeScript
Domains
Distributed systems · Consensus protocols (Tendermint/CometBFT) · Blockchain infrastructure
Infrastructure
AWS · Git