Neel Makhecha

Machine Learning Engineer @ Splunk (Cisco)

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I've been building apps since high school, though Apple made me wait until 18 to actually publish one. A few of the ones after that reached over a hundred thousand users.

After graduating I joined Splunk, where I've been through the Cisco acquisition. I've worked on the Splunk Mobile app, led the development of the Edge Hub lab, done some early work on Splunk AR for the Apple Vision Pro, and now I'm an ML engineer on the core AI platform. Not many people get to do all of that under one roof, let alone in three years.

Work

1. 2025 – 2026

   Splunk AI Platform — Joined the MCP Server team before GA and owned the extensibility surface from ERD through ship on Splunkbase. Also designed and built the platform's guardrails, and contributed to the design and implementation of a vector-DB powered managed indexing service.

2. 2023 – 2025

   Splunk Edge Hub — Under the office of the CTO. Led development of the Edge Hub lab at Cisco facilities: the physical rig, the test automation framework, and the build deployment tooling for automated e2e testing of Edge Hub and EdgeHubOS. Also designed and implemented a productionized Edge AI solution for Argos, powered by the Hub SDK and 3P container support. Read Splunk blog by the PM.

3. 2023

   Splunk AR — Early work on Splunk's augmented reality experiences on pre-GA Apple Vision Pro dev kits.

4. 2022 – 2023

   Splunk Mobile — Designed and shipped WidgetKit support and the notifications rework for Splunk Mobile on iOS, both demoed at .conf23. Spent the conference on the Pavilion floor doing 1:1s with customers and developers.

Open Source

• Catrobat — Google Summer of Code 2020, contributing drawing features to the iOS client of Catrobat, a no-code visual programming language. A year after Sticky Code, the same thing I keep coming back to: letting people build software without writing code. More on Google and GitHub.
• AlertX — A SwiftUI library that adds custom alerts through the same view-modifier pattern as the system ones. Shipped as a Swift Package, 250+ stars on GitHub.

Side Projects

• Attendance — Hit the App Store Top Charts in India, No. 1 in its category. 120K+ installs across iOS and Android, 4.6 average from 2K+ ratings.
• mod ZERO — A little math game about division, made for fun in my freshman year. Picked up close to 10K installs, and first prize at a university project competition.
• BlockDraw — Winner of Apple's Swift Student Challenge 2020, one of 350 worldwide. A game that teaches kids basic shapes by having them build objects out of rectangles, triangles and circles. The award came with a visit to Apple Park to meet Apple engineers, designers, and executives including Craig Federighi, Greg Joswiak, and Phil Schiller.
• Sticky Code — Winner of an Apple WWDC19 Scholarship, one of 125 that year. A Mac app that parses hand-arranged sticky-note flowcharts into compilable Swift, with shape and intent classifiers trained in Create ML and run on Core ML. An attempt at getting from intent to running code, a few years before models made that easy. The Times of India wrote about it.