Hi there, I'm Varun

Welcome to my corner of the internet! I am a computer science & engineering graduate student at ASU. I am also a backend developer with a focus on distributed systems. I am really passionate about programming and problem solving. I have over 3 years of industry experience in building and scaling applications in production.

See My Resume

What I do

I build software that runs on production

Programming and software development

Building backend microservices using several popular frameworks

Focus on delivering complete working product including but not limited to solutioning, design, development and infrastructure provisioing

Familiar with an array of languages and frameworks including Springboot (Java), Django (Python), Ruby on Rails, Javascript and Golang

Systems architecture and infrastructure

Experienced with building high scale applications that can handle thousands of requests per second

Have worked with a vast set of SQL and NoSQL databases including MySQL, MongoDB, PosgresQL, Redis

Have experience scaling systems using streaming platforms such as kafka, kinesis and message queues such as SQS

Highly experienced in working with major cloud providers such as AWS and Heroku. Have also worked in provisioning codified infrastructure using terraform

Have built deployment pipelines using docker, kubernetes and spinnakar

Proficiency

Problem solving

90%

System Architecture

90%

Backend

90%

Data structures and algorithms

100%

Databases

60%

Education

Arizona state university

Master's degree in computer science & engineering

August 2022 - Present

BITS Pilani

Bachelor's degree in chemical engineering

August 2015 - July 2019

Graduated in first division

Experience

Razorpay (YCombinator '15)

YC link

Software development engineer

June 2021 – August 2022

I worked as a backend engineer for the notifications team. My team was responsible for the delivery of every kind of notification from Razorpay. This included SMSes, Emails directly to end users containing OTPs, invoices, etc along with payment confirmation webhooks to the merchants' servers. My team was one of the most crucial teams at Razorpay and as a result, we have aggressive NFR goals, such as availability of five nines.

I implemented async DB writes of our notification attempts using kafka streams. This led to enormous horizontal scalability of worker pods. What used to be previously capped at ~190 pods could now be scaled to 1000 and more based on the load. Controlling the rate at which ingestion is happening in the DB made sure the DB did not go down due to unprecedented load, thus improving the reliability of our system.

I implemented quality of service based flow control for webhooks based on the merchant server's response time using Apache Pinot as the data source. Essentially, what this would do is stream merchant response time details to Pinot after each webhook attempt. Then in our Web pods, we would query Pinot to find out merchants that have a response time greater than some predefined value and route such merchants' webhooks to a lower priority queue. This tremendouesly improved the p99 webhooks delivery time (over 50% reduction in time taken was seen).

I worked on and helped deliver the webhooks flow control as well as rate limiting feature. I drove this feature end to end, did tech solutioning and execution. Did numerous performance tests and consulted with various stakeholders. This protected our service from DDOS attacks

Chronus

Link

Software development engineer

Feb 2020 - June 2021

I worked as a ruby on rails developer for the mentorship application.

Over my tenure of 1.5 years at Chronus as a software developer, my contributions to the company were to add various features to help with customer retainment.

My work at Chronus involved heavy use of algorithms. One notable algorithm that I used was LCA(least common ancestor) to find the common mentor who mentored two given mentees.

In addition to development, the infrastructure auto-scaling functionality I designed and implemented saved the company $0.07 per service call in infrastructure cost and ensured maximum availability and traffic readiness. This was implemented using AWS autoscaling groups and lambda functions

CGI

Link

Software engineer

April 2019 - Feb 2020

I worked as a backend developer in the Communications, Media and Utilities (CMU) business unit

Created production level web applications using spring-boot micro-services and angular.

Blue Yonder

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Software engineering intern

Jan 2019 - April 2019

I worked as a backend developer intern in the supply chain unit

Created dashboards for alert automation and managed file transfers using powershell and ASP.NET.

Used powershell to automate several parts of server build and validation.

Projects

Fastcar

Created a fully functional car game using C++. The game utilizes the C++ graphics library and creates an animated road with various obstacles the car has to overcome. The scores are calculated based on the number of obstacles over- come and stored

Chat application

Created a simple chat application using Golang

Contently (Content sharing platform)

Created a complete production level web application using spring- boot micro-services and angular. This is a platform where anyone can share their stories, opinion, essays, poetry, research, ideas or reflections without constraints on topic, genre, or length of publication. Uses multiple databases such as MySQL, MongoDB, Neo4j. Dockerized, deployed and hosted in AWS.

University timetable booking system

Created a modern timetable and class booking system using ruby on rails.

Wanna reach out to me? My inbox is open.

varun.mukundhan@gmail.com

(602) 768-7348