// SDE III · Backend Engineer · Founder
Distributed systems, low-latency WebRTC calling, live HLS transcoding & adaptive bitrate, and database platforms that hold up at millions of QPS — designed, shipped, and operated end to end, down to the bare metal.
pramod@prod:~$ whoami SDE III · Backend Engineer — distributed systems, real-time media, storage at scale pramod@prod:~$ ls ~/systems webrtc-sfu/ hls-pipeline/ datastore/ securovpn/ smtp-baremetal/ orchestrator/ pramod@prod:~$ curl -s localhost:9090/metrics | grep -E 'qps|p99' gateway_qps_total 2.4M storage_p99_latency_ms 18 pramod@prod:~$ uptime up 10+ years — load average: high, and holding pramod@prod:~$ ▊
I started on the frontend a decade ago and kept following the request deeper down the stack — through the API, into the queue, past the load balancer, and all the way to bare metal. I never came back up.
Today I design, build, and operate the unglamorous machinery that products stand on: SFU clusters moving live audio and video around the world, transcoding ladders feeding adaptive HLS to millions of screens, sharded datastores absorbing millions of queries per second, and the VPN and mail infrastructure most companies rent — built and run in-house instead, on hardware I can point at.
Currently SDE III at a stealth startup, building core infrastructure from zero. In parallel I run SecuroVPN, a privacy-first VPN service I founded and operate. I care about boring reliability, honest postmortems, and p99s over p50s.
Not demos — production systems with pagers attached.
Real-time 1:1 and group calling built on an SFU architecture — TURN/STUN fleets, simulcast with adaptive layer switching, jitter-buffer tuning, and regional media routing to keep glass-to-glass latency low on hostile mobile networks.
Ingest → transcode → segment → edge: a live-transmission pipeline producing full adaptive-bitrate ladders in real time, with backpressure-aware workers, segment-level health checks, and graceful degradation when encoders fall behind.
Sharded, replicated data platforms sustaining millions of queries per second: consistent-hash partitioning, hot-key mitigation, tiered Redis caching, write-ahead batching, and CDC streams feeding analytics — with p99s measured in milliseconds.
Founder & operator. Secure VPN service running on self-managed servers: WireGuard data plane, multi-region gateways, automated key rotation, DNS-leak protection, and a zero-log posture enforced by architecture, not policy.
Outbound mail without the SaaS bill: in-house SMTP servers on bare-metal VMs — DKIM/SPF/DMARC alignment, IP warm-up schedules, bounce classification, queue backpressure, and reputation monitoring to keep deliverability high.
The connective tissue: idempotent job orchestration with outbox + exactly-once semantics, distributed locks and leases, token-bucket rate limiting at the edge, circuit breakers, and full observability — metrics, traces, and SLO-driven alerts.
Building core platform infrastructure from zero: service architecture, data layer, real-time media systems, and the operational tooling around them.
Privacy-first VPN service designed, built, and operated end to end on self-managed infrastructure — product, data plane, billing, and ops.
Real-time social audio: low-latency calling systems and live HLS transmission with adaptive bitrate for large concurrent audiences.
Owned the core client-side JavaScript of an ad-tech platform running on thousands of publisher sites — a vanilla-JS ad-serving SDK loaded async to stay off the critical render path. Header-bidding orchestration in the browser, lazy-loaded ad slots via IntersectionObserver, DOM-safe injection inside third-party pages, and a tight bundle budget where every KB and reflow cost real revenue.
Shipped products for startups across three countries (Influidity, Parametric, StartAppHub, Multimedio+), core member of GDG Jalandhar, and taught JavaScript to 4,500+ students on Udemy. The frontend past makes me a better backend engineer.
$ mail -s "let's talk systems" pramod
mail@pramod.xyzGood systems problems are always welcome — the kind with real constraints, real traffic, and real consequences.