Hi, I'm Shashwat
Software Engineer building performant backends and full-stack applications. I care about systems that scale and developer experience that doesn't suck.
SD

About

I'm a software engineer at Interview Kickstart working on payments — gateway integrations, installment billing, and the flow that grants learners access after they pay. Previously at Instahyre I built distributed systems, search infrastructure, and optimized backend performance. Before that I built event-driven pipelines and SSR frontends as a full-stack contractor. I hold a degree in Electrical & Electronics Engineering from NMIT Bengaluru and have authored IEEE research papers on Quantum Computing. I like working across the stack — from Redis locking to Elasticsearch query parsers to Next.js SPAs.

Experience

Interview Kickstart

SDE-1

Interview Kickstart
  • Fixed 5 payment-gateway defects against the live API format, stopping real transactions from silently falling back to a backup provider
  • Fixed a double-counting bug in installment balance logic that was silently rejecting valid payments
  • Shipped a feature-flagged payment-flow rewrite with old and new systems running side-by-side for instant rollback
  • Cut learner activation delay by granting access on payment completion, with a 30-day auto-revoke if payment is never confirmed
  • Cut error-monitoring noise by ~30% by filtering expected no-ops, and added reference-ID logging for faster debugging
Instahyre

SDE-1

Instahyre
  • Designed Redis-based distributed locking (SETNX + TTL) to eliminate double-booking under concurrent traffic
  • Reduced API latency by 80% (p75: 600ms → 120ms) by profiling slow PostgreSQL queries and optimizing payloads
  • Built a stack-based boolean query parser (AND/OR/NOT) for Elasticsearch, improving matching relevance by 20%
  • Reduced regression bugs by 30% by decomposing a monolith into independently maintainable modules
Freelance Work

Full-Stack Developer

Freelance Work
Contract
  • Designed an event-driven pipeline using Kafka for asynchronous order processing across thousands of daily events
  • Implemented idempotent webhook-based payment confirmation, reducing duplicate order processing by 95%
  • Improved Core Web Vitals by 35% with a Next.js SSR architecture optimized for first-contentful paint and reduced JS bundle size

Education

Skills

Python
C++
Go
JavaScript
TypeScript
Git
GCP
BigQuery
AWS
Docker
Kubernetes
React
Next.js
Node.js
Bun.js
Elasticsearch
Django
RabbitMQ
Kafka
PostgreSQL
Redis
Cassandra
MySQL
SQL

My Projects

01

Jamin

Full-stack AI chat platform integrating multiple LLMs (GPT, Claude, Cohere) via LangChain. Features RAG-powered PDF Q&A and YouTube summarization, plus Stable Diffusion image generation. Scalable PostgreSQL/Drizzle backend enabling context-aware conversations across models.

React
Node.js
LangChain
PostgreSQL
Drizzle
OpenAI
Stable Diffusion
GitHubSource
02

Zort

Real-time collaborative whiteboard supporting 100+ concurrent users, built with Next.js and Socket.IO. Client-side state management via Zustand and localStorage to reduce server load. CI/CD pipeline with Docker and GitHub Actions for zero-failure automated deployments.

Next.js
Socket.IO
Zustand
Docker
GitHub Actions
GitHubSource
03

Phabric

Phabric is Vercel but with websocket support!

Next.js
Socket.IO
Zustand
Docker
GitHub Actions
GitHubSource
04

Code Compete

Code Compete is a platform for competitive programming problems. It is built with Next.js and Tailwind CSS. It is a platform for competitive programming problems. It is a platform for competitive programming problems.

Next.js
Socket.IO
Zustand
Docker
GitHub Actions
GitHubSource
Contact

Get in Touch

Have something in mind? Shoot me an email, connect on LinkedIn, or book a quick call — I'd love to hear from you.

Schedule a Meeting
GitHub
LinkedIn
X