~/Arjun Rao — zsh — 142x48
whoami --verbose

Arjun Rao

Distributed systems, low-latency infra, and developer tools. Builds things that scale past the easy benchmarks and stay paged-out at 3am.

portfolio/
├── about.md
├── work/
│   ├── razorpay
│   └── archive/
├── projects/
│   ├── rate-limiter-go
│   └── open-source/
└── contact.sh
$ whoami
Arjun Rao · Staff Software Engineer
$ pwd
Bengaluru, IN
$ curl -s status
open to staff / principal roles
$ uname -a
linux 6.7 · zsh · tmux · neovim · arch (btw)
scroll ↓
◆ Go◆ Rust◆ Postgres◆ Kafka◆ Kubernetes◆ gRPC◆ Redis◆ Terraform ◆ Go◆ Rust◆ Postgres◆ Kafka◆ Kubernetes◆ gRPC◆ Redis◆ Terraform ◆ Go◆ Rust◆ Postgres◆ Kafka◆ Kubernetes◆ gRPC◆ Redis◆ Terraform
cat about.md | less

01 //Readme

hostArjun Rao
roleStaff Software Engineer
locBengaluru, IN
shellzsh 5.9
editorneovim + lazyvim
kernellinux 6.7.2-arch
coffee3 cups/day (too many)

Ten years of shipping systems that other people rely on — payments, data infra, and the boring middle layer nobody thanks you for. I care about latency percentiles, postmortems people actually read, and writing code that the on-call engineer can understand at 3am.

Currently Staff at Razorpay, leading a 14-person infra chapter. Maintain rate-limiter-go (10.4k★) on the side. Three conference talks; the most recent at GopherCon India 2024 on rewriting a settlement engine without downtime.

10+
years shipping
₹42k cr
moved annually
10.4k★
OSS stars
3
conference talks
git log --all --oneline experience.log

02 //Commit History

a1b2c3d <full-time> Mar 2022 – Present · Remote · Bengaluru
Staff Software Engineer
Razorpay
Technical lead on the payments platform. Owned the rewrite of the settlement engine — moved ₹42,000 cr/year through a new Go service with p99 from 380ms to 38ms. Mentors the infra chapter (14 engineers). Shipped a disaster-recovery drill that now runs quarterly company-wide.
+48,219 insertions −62,704 deletions impact: p99 -90%
#go#postgres#kafka#terraform#leadership
e4f5a6b <full-time> Jul 2019 – Feb 2022 · Bengaluru
Senior Engineer, Data Platform
Swiggy
Rebuilt the pricing and surge-compute engine. Owned the Kafka estate — peak 2.4M msg/sec, 40+ topics, 120+ consumers. Three Big Billion Days as primary on-call, zero customer-visible outages. Wrote the internal SRE handbook still referenced today.
+72,014 insertions −18,332 deletions impact: 2.4M msg/s
#kafka#scala#python#sre
c7d8e9f <full-time> Aug 2016 – Jun 2019 · Pune
Engineer
ThoughtWorks
Consulting engineer across four clients in insurance, banking, and logistics. Introduced TDD and trunk-based workflows at two of them — one is still on the process four years later. Ran the internal Go guild. Best-performer award 2018.
+91,448 insertions −24,190 deletions impact: four clients
#tdd#go#java#consulting
0ss42fc <open-source> 2018 – Present · github.com
Open Source Maintainer
rate-limiter-go
Maintainer of a distributed token-bucket rate limiter used by 200+ companies including two Fortune 500s. 10.4k stars, 88 contributors. Released v2 with 3× throughput on the same hardware. Three conference talks built around the internals.
+14,302 insertions −2,118 deletions impact: 10.4k stars
#oss#go#redis#grpc
◇ rate-limiter-go◇ pgslow◇ kctx◇ Conference: scaling p99 ◇ rate-limiter-go◇ pgslow◇ kctx◇ Conference: scaling p99 ◇ rate-limiter-go◇ pgslow◇ kctx◇ Conference: scaling p99
ls -la projects/

03 //Repositories

github/arjun/rate-limiter-go★ 10.4k
rate-limiter-go
[Go · Redis · gRPC]
Distributed token-bucket rate limiter. 1.2M QPS on a single node, sliding-window + leaky-bucket strategies, pluggable backends. Core dependency at two exchanges and one fintech unicorn.
lang Go license Apache-2.0 status maintained
github/arjun/pgslow★ 3.8k
pgslow
[Rust · Postgres · Tokio]
Rust CLI that streams pg_stat_statements, classifies queries by shape, and flags regressions before they page you. Used in production at four series-B companies. Integrates with Datadog and Grafana.
lang Rust license MIT status active
github/arjun/kctx★ 5.2k
kctx
[Zsh · kubectl]
Kubernetes context switcher that remembers what you had open. Fuzzy-search, ASCII cluster preview, alias autoreload. Ships in the official k8s ecosystem awesome list. 5.2k stars.
lang Zsh license MIT status maintained
rao.sh/talks/p99★ 22k views
Conference: scaling p99
[GoPhercon · Rootconf · GopherFest]
A talk on the last 18 months rewriting a payments settlement engine. Covers the CAP trade-offs, the Kafka replay design, and the three incidents that shaped the rollout. Watched by 22k engineers combined.
lang Talk license CC-BY status published
cat .skills.cfg | sort

04 //htop --skills

GoRustPostgresKafkaKubernetesgRPCRedisTerraform GoRustPostgresKafkaKubernetesgRPCRedisTerraform GoRustPostgresKafkaKubernetesgRPCRedisTerraform
Go █████████░░ 88%
Rust █████████░░ 88%
Postgres █████████░░ 88%
Kafka █████████░░ 88%
Kubernetes █████████░░ 88%
gRPC █████████░░ 88%
Redis █████████░░ 88%
Terraform █████████░░ 88%
cat education.json

05 //Training Data

2016 · on-disk
M.S. Distributed Systems
@ IIIT Hyderabad
CGPA 9.1 / 10 · Gold medal, systems track
2014 · on-disk
B.Tech Computer Science
@ NIT Trichy
CGPA 8.9 / 10 · Best Undergrad Thesis award
./contact.sh --all

Open a PR on me.

emailarjun@rao.sh linkedinhttps://linkedin.com/in/arjunrao githubhttps://github.com/arjun-rao