// Lead Software Engineer
Architect · Distributed systems · AI-native builder
7 years building production systems at the intersection of distributed infrastructure, data engineering, and AI. I stay 50–60% hands-on in every leadership role because you can't lead engineers well if you've lost touch with the craft.
About
I started as a full-stack engineer but curiosity kept pulling me further. I picked up multiple frameworks, cloud platforms, published my own npm package, and eventually fell into cybersecurity because I thought it was cool, one of the best detours of my career. It completely changed how I design systems.
Security isn't something I bolt on at the end, it's how I think from the first design conversation. That mindset has proven its worth more than once, including leading the response to a critical malicious attack on a live ecommerce platform and driving a full SOC2 compliance initiative.
By year three I was the youngest on a four-person core team, setting technical direction across an entire organisation — leading AWS adoption, DevSecOps practices, and engineering standards. I also ran Nullcast, an open source developer community where I mentored engineers and ran bi-monthly technical sessions.
On the technical side, I'd like to believe I’m a polyglot engineer with expertise in Go, Node.js, TypeScript, python, Kafka-driven event pipelines, AWS at depth, Terraform, CI/CD, OO and domain-driven design. I've built mass notification systems, resilient and fault tolerant CRM sync pipelines(batch and realtime), customer segmentation engines, business intelligence platforms and real-time IoT telemetry infrastructure. I also would like to assure you I’m not just an engineer with breadth, I have focused on considerable amount of depth on design patterns, concurrency problems and databases like postgres under load.
I stay 50–60% hands-on even in senior leadership roles because you can't lead engineers well if you've lost touch with the craft.
"I have worked with Aakash since the end of 2023, with me being the CPTO for HeadCoach and Aakash being the Chief Architect of the development team at NeoITO. I have been impressed by the quality of Aakash's work, the thoughtfulness he brings to discussions, his ability to interpret what is important from the general flow of ideas, and the exemplary work ethic he displays.
Building for a startup is very different from building for an established enterprise. Often, the ideas are not well-formed, may be contradictory, or change at the drop of a hat. Aakash takes this all in stride, tuning into my way of isolating the immediate priorities and discarding the work that is less important. I cannot emphasize how critical his support has been - to the point where I felt he had as much ownership as I did!
Whoever has the benefit of working with Aakash is very lucky indeed. I would not hesitate for a second if given other opportunities to work with him. A top, top engineer, architect, and product mind."
Core competencies
Leadership
Languages
Frontend
Backend
Cloud & DevOps
Data engineering
AI & LLM
Experience
Architected a fully LLM-native sales intelligence engine — automating deep research on CRM accounts and contacts, mapping meetings and emails to Salesforce opportunities in real time, and integrating automated meeting bots for post-call insights. Designed fault-tolerant ingestion pipelines across Salesforce, Gmail, and calendar integrations. Identified and remediated critical security vulnerabilities across the stack.
↗ Greenfield architect of a fully LLM-native sales intelligence platform with real-time CRM enrichment, meeting intelligence, and agentic workflows in production
Led DevSecOps response to a critical security incident, implemented comprehensive security measures across the organisation and drove SOC2 compliance initiative. Engineered a customer segmentation engine and high-performance mass notification system supporting push, email, and SMS at scale. Built ETL pipelines integrating recall campaign data from Keyloop via ODBC.
↗ Led live incident response to a critical malicious attack, then turned the crisis into a full SOC2 compliance initiative and cut AWS costs by 56%.
Progressed from engineer to Solutions Architect within 3 years. Youngest member of a four-person core team setting technical direction across the entire organisation. Spearheaded the AWS Partnership Alliance. Mentored 8 engineers who stayed for 3 years. Won Leadership Award 2021 for pulling a critical product back from the edge. Led a tiger team of 13 engineers to resurrect and deliver a failing enterprise project. Delivered 10+ client projects spanning BI platforms, IoT infrastructure, data engineering, fintech, and community platforms.
↗ Youngest Core Team member, technical direction across entire org.
↗ Tiger team of 13, rescued and shipped a collapsing enterprise project.
↗ Leadership Award 2021, mentored 8 engineers retained for 3 years.
Featured projects
01 — FEATURED
Production-grade IoT telemetry pipeline ingesting high-frequency sensor data from 2,000 devices at 16,000 messages/second. Built in Go with Kafka, TimescaleDB, and Confluent Schema Registry. Four independently scalable services — simulator, ingestor, stream processor, and sink — each with DLQ, graceful shutdown, and idempotent writes. Per-device ordering guaranteed end-to-end. Sub-500ms ingest latency, ~10ms stream processing latency.
↗ Go · Kafka · TimescaleDB · PostgreSQL · Confluent Schema Registry · Avro
02
LLM-native intelligence engine automating deep research on CRM accounts and contacts. Fault-tolerant bidirectional sync across Salesforce, Gmail, and calendar integrations. Automated meeting bot integration delivering real-time post-call insights and strategic deep-dives to sales teams. Rewrote core Salesforce integration using AI-assisted development — 6 weeks compressed to 10 days.
↗ Node.js · Python · Go · Vue.js · AWS · OpenAI · Salesforce · RAG
03
Enterprise-grade BI and data analytics platform built on AWS serverless microservices. Multi-tenant architecture with React client, Python ETL pipelines, AWS Glue, Redshift, and QuickSight. Integrated with AWS Marketplace generating direct business leads. Owned end-to-end from architecture through team delivery.
↗ React · Node.js · Python · AWS Glue · Redshift · QuickSight · Lambda
04
End-to-end marketing analytics platform integrating Google, Bing, Facebook, TikTok ad data, GA4, AppsFlyer, and internal app databases into a unified Snowflake data warehouse. Built for both B2C and B2B products. Multi-touch attribution, ad fatigue detection, predictive LTV modelling, and real-time performance dashboards via Omni Analytics. Reduced monthly AWS billing by 52%.
↗ Snowflake · dbt · BigQuery · Omni Analytics · Python · AppsFlyer · GA4
Contact
Open to senior engineering and architecture roles · Auckland, NZ