I'm drawn to the hard problems that sit beneath the surface — the platform primitives, data pipelines, and infrastructure decisions that determine whether a product can scale or not. I've spent my career building the foundational systems that other engineers build on top of.
Now
I'm a Staff Software Engineer at Rippling. Currently building as part of Rippling AI — tinkering with agents. Before the AI team, I led platform services: dependency tracking systems that process millions of events daily to keep customer-defined rules in sync, GDPR compliance pipelines scaled to 10M+ object deletions, and a translation platform supporting dynamic multi-language globalization. The stack is streaming ingestion, query engines, document databases, Flink, and Kafka.
Before
At slice, I went from SDE II to Staff Engineer in two years. I formed the banking vertical from scratch — designed the transaction engine for savings accounts and deposits, introduced Temporal for workflow orchestration, and led loan origination systems. I also revamped CI/CD pipelines across 250+ engineers, drove the ECS to Kubernetes migration, and led the MongoDB to PostgreSQL migration for our team. I built an AI code reviewer powered by frontier LLMs that caught issues before human reviewers did.
At Vedantu, I was a founding engineer on the platform team. I built the real-time backend for VQuiz from scratch — a live quiz product with 1M+ daily active users, handling thousands of concurrent connections streaming through YouTube. I moved a legacy video streaming service to Kubernetes that controlled 12,000+ containers daily. I cut $150K+ per year in AWS costs through instance rightsizing, storage tier optimization, autoscaling, and Docker image reduction. I wrote about it — that became the infrastructure chapter on this site.
Before all of that, I was a Google Summer of Code intern at Wikimedia, building video editing tools for Commons. And an engineering intern at Paramount on the Data Lifecycle Manager team.
Side of desk
I angel invest in early-stage startups. I have 107 repos on GitHub (username: TypicalDefender). I build parsers and compilers for fun — the kind of projects where you spend a weekend implementing a recursive descent parser and come out understanding why programming languages work the way they do. Those projects became the parser series on this site.
This site
Every chapter here started as something I had to build at work. The parser series came from wanting to deeply understand language processing. The infrastructure chapter is literally the Vedantu cost reduction project. The interface design chapters come from building scheduling software with optimistic updates, nested bottom sheets, and timezone-safe date handling. I write about what I've shipped.