Dr. Satish Chandra

(BT/CSE/1991)

Dr. Satish Chandra is a Research Scientist at Meta, where he leads work on AI agents for software development. For nearly three decades, he has worked on the tools that software engineers use to build, test, and repair large software systems - first through mathematical analysis of programs, and more recently through machine learning and large language models.
He earned his B.Tech. in Computer Science and Engineering from IIT Kanpur in 1991 and his Ph.D. from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1997, where his doctoral work received the Computer Sciences Department's Outstanding Graduate Researcher Award.
His career began at Bell Laboratories, where he developed techniques for analysing software to detect defects. At IBM Research, he advanced program analysis and test automation for large enterprise software systems, with his research incorporated into IBM products and services. He also spent several years at IBM Research India, where he founded a software engineering research group among the first of its kind in the country.
He joined Facebook in 2016 and founded Big Code, one of the first industrial research groups dedicated to applying artificial intelligence to software development. The team built tools that automatically fix software defects, recommend code, search large codebases by intent, and make software testing more efficient. Several of these technologies were deployed in Facebook's production environment, supporting software used by billions of people.
From 2022 to 2025 at Google, he led work on applying large language models to software development, including Gemini for Google, a version of Google's Gemini model adapted to the company's own software and engineering environment. The work brought advanced AI assistance into the everyday development process of tens of thousands of Google engineers. He returned to Meta in 2025, where he works on AI agents that can carry out software-development tasks autonomously, and on how the capabilities of such systems should be measured.
Dr. Chandra has authored close to 100 research papers in leading venues including POPL, PLDI, ICSE, FSE, and OOPSLA. He is an ACM Fellow, a member of the inaugural class of the ACM SIGSOFT Software Engineering Academy, and an elected member of IFIP Working Group 2.4.
In recognition of his distinguished contributions to software engineering in general, and to AI-driven developer tools in particular, IIT Kanpur confers upon Dr. Satish Chandra the Distinguished Alumni Award 2026 under the category of Professional Excellence.