Rootul Patel
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
Jul 2022 — Present
Engineering Manager · Mar 2026 — Present
- Lead an 8-person team owning reliability, performance, and scale for the Celestia protocol
- Set and drive Q2 OKRs across network reliability, protocol performance, and scale
Team Lead · Dec 2025 — Mar 2026
- Led a 4-person team owning the Celestia consensus layer
Senior Software Engineer · Jul 2022 — Dec 2025
- Led Celestia's first consensus-breaking upgrade (v2.0.0), establishing the framework reused by every subsequent network upgrade
- Authored 1,168 and reviewed 2,427 merged pull requests across celestia-app and celestia-core
Amazon Web Services
Jun 2020 — Apr 2022
Software Development Engineer II
- 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
Aug 2016 — May 2020
Software Engineer · Aug 2017 — 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
Forward Deployed Engineer · Aug 2016 — Aug 2017
- 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
Infrastructure
AWS · Git