Before writing code or working in the cloud, he immersed himself in physics and mathematics, spending evenings solving problems and chasing the logic behind complexity. Olympiads became a proving ground for that habit. They taught him to reason under constraints and stay steady when answers did not arrive quickly. They instilled a habit of bringing structure to complexity.
That same fascination now drives the work of Nataraj Mocherla, Principal Software Development Engineer at Amazon. Over a 15-plus-year career, he has designed distributed systems and data platforms that support Amazon’s most mission-critical services. His systems design journey began in those early years of structured problem-solving.
Early Discipline in Problem Solving
Nataraj’s early competition record shows the depth of that curiosity. He earned an All India Rank of 59 in the National Science Olympiad and placed in the national top one percent in the National Standard Examination in Physics. He secured Hyderabad city’s top rank in the Young Mathematicians Contest.
At IIT Bombay, he found computer science as a way to express the ideas he already loved. One early project, a symbolic differentiator for mathematical functions, turned abstract reasoning into a tool others could reuse. That satisfaction, taking a clean idea and making it real, became a career pattern.
Academic Depth and Security Roots
Nataraj built an academic range that matched his ambition for scale. He completed a Bachelor’s and Master’s in Computer Science at IIT Bombay, followed by a second Master’s at the Georgia Institute of Technology.
His IIT master’s thesis focused on detecting metamorphic and polymorphic malware. The work involved adversarial thinking, failure-mode modeling, and system correctness. Those instincts later helped him design cloud services that require scale, auditability, and precise guarantees.
During an internship at INRIA in France, he designed an automated packet-crafting tool to detect security gaps in VoIP systems. At Georgia Tech, he deepened skills in distributed systems, networking, databases, and data processing.
He studied social computing and human-computer interaction, gaining insights that shaped analytics platforms for decision-makers, not just machines.
Enterprise Grounding Before Amazon
Before Amazon, Nataraj worked at Qontext on enterprise collaboration software and at Pegasystems on full-stack business process management systems. He also served as a Graduate Research Assistant at Georgia Tech, exploring distributed systems and security in applied settings. These roles grounded him in enterprise software before Amazon became the defining arc of his career.
Amazon: Innovation at Global Scale
Photo: Amazon headquarters – Daniel Nyoka | Unsplash
Nataraj’s defining work sits at Amazon, where he has built systems that changed how cloud services react to data and how teams measure customer experience at scale.
AWS Chapter: Event-Driven Infrastructure at Scale
He joined Amazon Web Services in 2014 and worked on core technologies for Amazon S3. As a founding engineer for S3 Event Notifications, he co-designed the routing and control plane that turned S3 into a high-volume event source. Storage could trigger compute automatically, enabling the launch of AWS Lambda in 2014. Real-time eventing at S3 scale required inventing both architecture and fairness rules from scratch.
Visual 1: S3 events triggering AWS Lambda workflows – AWS Documentation
He later invented a multi-queue delivery architecture, U.S. Patent 10,523,532 B1. It now dispatches billions of S3 events daily to AWS Lambda, Amazon SQS, and Amazon SNS while preserving multi-tenant guarantees. He led S3 Data Events for CloudTrail, enabling object-level auditing and closing compliance gaps for customers.
CXBT Chapter: Customer Experience Systems at Scale
After contributing to core cloud technologies at AWS, Nataraj joined Amazon’s Customer Experience and Business Trends organization, where he now serves as a Principal SDE (L7), helping guide engineering initiatives focused on improving how customers experience Amazon’s products and services.
In this role, he focuses on building automated systems and data capabilities that support a more consistent understanding of customer experience. He helps define the technical direction for systems that ensure customer-experience insights are delivered with greater consistency, clarity, and operational simplicity.
Challenges and Growth: Leading Without Precedent
Nataraj has consistently taken on problems without a defined model. When building real-time eventing for Amazon S3, there was no industry precedent at that scale. He defined the problem from first principles and invented architecture and fairness mechanisms that held under massive load.
In CXBT, he brought the same approach to organizational ambiguity, aligning leaders and designing systems that scaled with evolving ownership.
“I often began with undefined problems. Framing the challenge was part of building the solution,” he said.
Core Expertise and Measured Impact
His expertise lies in distributed systems and large-scale architecture. He designs systems for reliability, low latency, and multi-tenant fairness, and builds scalable foundations that support high-volume event processing, efficient coordination, and predictable performance across complex workloads.
He also architects big data platforms with governance at the core. His work covers ETL orchestration, federated query engines, metadata systems, and Spark-based processing. He now extends that platform mindset into agentic AI workflows that pair LLM reasoning with governed data access.
His projects deliver measurable outcomes that matter to peers and decision-makers. He consistently delivers outcomes that matter to senior engineering leaders. At AWS, he contributed to the evolution of Amazon S3’s event capabilities, improving their efficiency, scalability, and reliability for the high-volume, real-time applications that depend on them.
Technical Leadership and Professional Standing
Nataraj leads through clarity and mechanism design. He defines long-term roadmaps, resolves ambiguity, and aligns leaders on architectural strategy. He mentors engineers, applied scientists, and product managers, treating organizational health as a technical responsibility.
“Software engineering, for me, is a discipline of clarity,” Nataraj noted.
He holds memberships in the Association for Computing Machinery and the Institution of Engineering and Technology, reflecting ongoing engagement with the broader computing community.
Future Direction and Continuing Influence
Nataraj plans to expand his impact by building the next generation of large-scale data and intelligence platforms at Amazon. By unifying governed data, automation, agentic AI, and human insight, he aims to help teams reach actionable understanding faster and with greater confidence.
He aims to deepen mentorship and contribute through thought leadership in distributed systems, cloud architecture, and AI-driven automation.
For engineers and product leaders facing open-ended problems, his path offers a lesson: start from first principles, name the constraint that matters most, and design mechanisms that keep working as scale and ownership evolve.
