[6] After completing a BTech at IIT Madras in 2005, he obtained an MSc (2007) and PhD (2009) at the University of Washington under the supervision of Venkatesan Guruswami.
After a postdoctoral position at Microsoft Research New England, he became faculty at the University of California at Berkeley.
Raghavendra showed that assuming the unique games conjecture, semidefinite programming is the optimal algorithm for solving constraint satisfaction problems.
Together with David Steurer, he developed the small set expansion hypothesis, for which they won the Michael and Shiela Held Prize in 2018.
Together with David Steurer, he gave an invited talk on the topic at the 2018 ICM.