Priya Raghavan

Priya is a senior data engineer with 11 years building analytics platforms, most recently at Stripe where she led the migration of the merchant analytics pipeline from pandas to polars (cut p95 batch latency from 42 minutes to under 6). Before Stripe she spent four years at Mode Analytics writing the query engine that powered customer dashboards, and two years at Etsy on the seller-insights team. She writes mainly about polars internals, lazy evaluation patterns, and the practical edges of moving production pandas code to polars without breaking analyst muscle memory. Her side project is a 12k-row benchmark suite comparing pandas 2.x, polars, and DuckDB across realistic e-commerce joins. Priya lives in Oakland, mentors through Women in Data, and is slowly learning to play go.