Utkarsh Paliwal | Senior Software Engineer

01

About Me

I'm a Senior Software Engineer who measures success not just by deliverables but also by what doesn't happen - no 3AM pages, no data inconsistencies, no unexplained failures. My job is to build systems that operators can trust and forget about.

Most of my work lives in the unglamorous middle: data extraction pipelines that handle edge cases gracefully, cloud infrastructure that scales without intervention, and monitoring that surfaces real problems instead of noise. I've learned that the best systems aren't the cleverest ones—they're the ones that fail predictably and recover automatically. I build across the full stack—backend systems are my home base, but I ship production React applications and own features from database to browser.

I think in trade-offs. Every technical decision has costs, and I've developed strong opinions about when to optimize for simplicity versus flexibility, when to build versus buy, and when "good enough" is actually the right answer. I prefer owning problems end-to-end rather than passing tickets between teams.

Primary Stack

Golang / Java / Python
React / TypeScript
AWS (Lambda, Step Functions, S3, etc.)
Terraform / Helm / CICD
PostgreSQL / NoSQL
Docker / Kubernetes

Domains

Full-Stack Development
Distributed Systems
Data Pipelines
Cloud Infrastructure
API Design

02

Core Strengths

⚙️

Production-Grade Systems

I design for failure modes, not just happy paths. My systems include circuit breakers, retry logic, dead-letter queues, and clear runbooks. When things break, they break gracefully.

📊

Data Pipeline Architecture

Built extraction and transformation pipelines processing millions of records with exactly-once semantics. Strong focus on idempotency, checkpointing, and handling upstream schema changes.

☁️

AWS Infrastructure

Deep experience with serverless architectures (Lambda, Step Functions), event-driven systems, and infrastructure-as-code. I optimize for cost, observability, and operational simplicity.

🔍

Observability & Debugging

I instrument systems to answer questions before they're asked. Structured logging, meaningful metrics, distributed tracing—built to reduce MTTR and eliminate alert fatigue.

🏗️

System Design

I scope technical solutions, identify dependencies early, and communicate trade-offs clearly. I've led architecture discussions and turned ambiguous requirements into concrete implementation plans.

🤝

Technical Leadership

Mentored engineers, led code reviews focused on teaching not gatekeeping, and written documentation that actually gets read. I believe good engineers make other engineers better.

03

What I'm Known For

Making pipelines forgettable. Systems I build tend to disappear from team consciousness—which is the point.
Debugging across system boundaries. I'm often pulled into incidents that span services, teams, or vendors because I can trace causality through distributed systems.
Writing the doc that prevents the next outage. Post-mortems, runbooks, and decision records that actually get referenced.

04

Selected Projects

Content Deduplication Pipeline

Data Engineering

Our scraper pipelines were flooding the system with duplicate content—pages that already existed in our database were being reprocessed daily, triggering unnecessary downstream work and alerts. I implemented content-based deduplication by hashing page content at ingestion and comparing against stored hashes in Postgres. The challenge was balancing hash precision with storage costs, and handling partial updates without false negatives.

Result: 90% reduction in pipeline noise. Downstream systems stopped thrashing on unchanged data, and alert fatigue dropped dramatically.

Scala PostgreSQL Temporal

AI Studio — Multi-Agent Workflow Platform

Full Stack / AI

Built an intelligent workflow orchestration platform where users describe tasks in natural language and the system coordinates specialized AI agents to execute them. The LLM coordinator parses prompts, selects appropriate agents, manages input/output flow between them, and allows users to export solutions as reusable workflows. The interesting design challenge was building compositional problem-solving—new workflows can build on previously solved sub-problems.

Result: Complex multi-step processes that took hours manually now execute in minutes. Workflows are shareable and composable across teams.

React Next.js Node.js Socket.IO Python CrewAI

Kubernetes Autoscaling with KEDA

Cloud / DevOps

Led Kubernetes autoscaling initiatives using KEDA for application workers, implementing intelligent resource allocation across microservices. The challenge was tuning scale-up/scale-down thresholds to handle bursty workloads without over-provisioning during quiet periods—getting this wrong meant either wasted spend or dropped jobs during spikes.

Result: Achieved 100+ concurrent worker capacity with optimized cloud costs through right-sizing and metrics-based scaling. Workloads now scale to demand automatically.

Kubernetes KEDA Helm Prometheus Terraform

05

How I Work

I own problems, not tasks

I don't just implement tickets—I understand why we're building something, push back on unclear requirements, and follow up after deployment to verify the problem is actually solved.

I debug systematically

When something breaks, I form hypotheses, gather evidence, and narrow down methodically. I've developed strong intuition for where to look first, but I verify before acting.

I write for the next engineer

Code comments explain why, not what. Documentation covers operational concerns, not just API signatures. I assume the person maintaining this system won't be me.

I communicate proactively

Blockers are surfaced early. Technical decisions are documented with context. I'd rather over-communicate than let stakeholders be surprised.

I optimize for predictability

I reach for proven patterns over novel approaches. The goal is systems that behave the same way at 3AM as they do during demos. Clever code is a liability.

I invest in tooling

If I'm doing something manually more than twice, I automate it. Local development, testing, deployment—smooth tooling compounds over time.

06

What I'm Looking For

I'm exploring senior level engineering roles where I can have significant technical ownership - backend and full-stack positions.

Interesting Problems

Distributed systems, data platforms, infrastructure challenges. Problems where the solution isn't obvious and trade-offs matter.

High Ownership

Environments where engineers own systems end-to-end, not just write code to spec. I want to be accountable for outcomes.

Strong Engineering Culture

Teams that value code review, testing, documentation, and technical excellence. Places where senior engineers mentor and elevate others.

Impact at Scale

Products that serve real users at meaningful scale. I'm motivated by building systems that matter.

Let's Connect

I'm always interested in hearing about challenging engineering opportunities. If you're building something technically interesting, I'd like to hear about it.

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