I am a senior researcher in the Networking Research Group at Microsoft Research, Redmond. My research focuses on improving the robustness of large-scale networked systems where correctness is defined by informal specifications. I build hybrid reasoning frameworks that combine formal methods, optimization, and LLM-assisted inference to turn artifacts like logs, natural-language RFCs, and heuristic source code into actionable guarantees. This spans protocol testing, misconfiguration detection, and worst-case heuristic analysis.

I graduated with a Ph.D. in CS from UCLA in 2022, advised by two amazing people, Prof. Todd Millstein and Prof. George Varghese.

Before UCLA happened, I was an undergraduate in the CSE department at IIT Kharagpur where I was advised by Prof. Sandip Chakraborty for my undergraduate thesis.

Click here for my Microsoft webpage.

Contact Me

Office:   Microsoft Building 99, Redmond, WA
Email:   sivakakarla microsoft com