Bengaluru
I am solving interesting problems at the intersection of infrastructure and performance at Lyric, a young & ambitious startup in the niche area of supply chain software. Before this, I had the chance to be part of the founding team of a now-defunct startup CommandK which attempted to solve the sprawl problem of code configs and secrets at fast-growing companies. And even before, I had an amazing stint with the Data Platform and Growth Engineering teams at Disney+ Hotstar, a video streaming behemoth. I like to call myself a polymath engineer, but ain’t an “expert” in any particular area.
Lately
- WritingA love letter to the Highlands
- PhotosRajasthan Extra Time 202510 photos
- Moving11,273 km on foot and by bikesince Aug 2022
I’m an avid reader of non-fiction work (mostly history, technology, psychology), and the stories that connect them help me understand and reason about our complex world. Cycling, running, hiking and being an outdoor person has been my way of life. I’ve always obsessed over being a creative person with stories and code as my medium of expression. Large-scale systems which just work (think financial markets, democracy, submarine cables, city logistics) always fascinate me, and an unconditional hobby of mine is to quantitatively deconstruct these systems.
Curiosity takes me places, literally. I don’t have much social media presence, but I intend to share photos, stories and adventures through this site. I can keep talking about twentieth-century history and cultural backdrops of science and music, debating economic fallacies and brainstorming effectiveness of startup ideas. On obsessions, I’ve found the research area of mechanistic interpretability to be incredibly riveting!
Journey up until
- In my sophomore year, I did my first internship with Guvi Geek Networks back when it was a ten-person startup, where we had our first tinkering with AI (albeit classical NLTK stuff) - built scrappy prototypes of a scalable resume parser and a grammar-correction tool.
- At University, I was a student researcher at Next Tech Lab; we thought cutting-edge is cool and played superficially with Ethereum smart contract programming and neural networks. Conquered a couple of national hackathons, developed some valuable intuitions, but produced no serious research at all. As comical as it sounds, we were in it for the blockchain technology and not for the lure of crypto.
- The curiosity with smart contract programming landed me a gig with QuillHash Technologies; put on security research hats, and got to fiddle with smart contract security tooling and “Tokens” (way before NFTs were cool). Well, if you come to hear about QuillAudits, the naive, first version was shipped by me! :)
- I’ve always loved working with hardware, and had also picked up another gig which involved programming the ESP32 and STM32. While no chips were fried in the making, the work was cross-disciplinary and fun (bootloaders to MicroPython to BLE to Ionic and what not!). Some extension of this work has been talked about here.
While most of the former were small-scale experimental projects, my first exposure to how a complex software beast runs and is being run, was at Disney+ Hotstar. Dealing with the unknowns of the higher scale helped me mature my perspectives on how we design systems and manage trade-offs. A sweet outcome of this has been, it helped me develop a knack for writing “personal scale software”.