Software Engineer · Systems & Scale
शैलेश शिवम
I build systems that people depend on without thinking about — the kind that quietly do their job at 3 AM.
S. Shivam
The best infrastructure disappears. You stop thinking about it, and start thinking about what you're building on top of it.
The demo is not the product
I care about what happens at 3 AM when the model returns garbage and your users are waiting.
Read the source first
Most bugs live in the gap between what you think a library does and what it actually does.
Own the outcome, not the ticket
I don't hand off code I wouldn't want to debug at midnight. If I built it, I stand behind it.
Simple systems survive
The clever solution impresses in review. The boring one is still running three years later.
Previously at
Selected Work
Things I've built
Each one started as someone's hard problem. I took it from "we need this" to "it's in production."
Occupancy Planning Platform
Fortune 500 companies were spending weeks planning office layouts. I built the system that does it in hours.
AI PII Detection Engine
Most privacy tools ask where your data is. Ours found it automatically — scanning codebases, databases, and SaaS tools.
Blockchain Indexing
The old system polled every wallet every 5 minutes. I rebuilt it to listen. Eight chains, sub-second notifications.
Zero-Downtime Migration
Two million healthcare documents, one month, zero downtime. The kind of migration where nobody notices.
Writing
Thinking out loud
Notes on the problems I've solved, the trade-offs I've made, and the things I'm still figuring out.
How I Built a PII Detection Engine with LLMs
The architecture behind an ML-powered system that continuously scans codebases, databases, and SaaS integrations for sensitive data.
Zero-Downtime Database Migration at Scale
Two million documents. One month. Zero downtime. Here's how we migrated healthcare documents from Cloudinary to AWS S3.
Event-Driven Architecture Wasn't a Buzzword — It Was a Fix
How we moved wallet monitoring from batch processing to event-driven architecture — and why the architectural shift matters beyond the performance numbers.
Connect
Let's build something
worth keeping.
I take on a handful of projects at a time — the kind where I can own it end to end and the work actually matters.