[ 00. INTRODUCTION ]

Backend Engineer · Distributed Systems

HIRNAYMAY BHASKAR

I own the messaging, billing and event infrastructure at a YC + Sequoia-backed commerce platform. Mostly: finding why something at scale is slow, wrong, or losing money — and fixing the cause rather than the symptom.

[ 01. EXPERIENCE ]

BIK.AI

Present

Software Engineer II

Apr 2026 – Present | Bengaluru, India

Software Engineer, Dec 2024 – Mar 2026

• Diagnosed a Pub/Sub delivery backlog the team had been absorbing with a 38-node scale-out; rebuilt consumer flow control, ack-deadline handling and backpressure to cut delivery delay from 2.4 hours to 94 seconds and steady-state backlog from 236K messages to ~100 — retiring all 38 nodes
• Redesigned campaign analytics infrastructure with a two-tier PostgreSQL cache + Elasticsearch data stream pipeline, taking page load from 20s to 200ms while doubling page size
• Rearchitected Shopify segment sync as a two-machine state machine (orchestrator + sync executor) with run-scoped checkpointing, idempotent retries and paced execution under GraphQL rate limits — sustaining reliable sync across 250+ Shopify stores and customer lists exceeding 2M+ records, replacing the codebase’s #1 acknowledged technical debt
• Built BIK’s RCS broadcast platform from scratch—designed a generic channel abstraction for provider-agnostic campaign execution, then implemented Node.js microservices with Redis-backed segment delivery and a webhook-driven status update pipeline, processing 2.5M messages/month for 50+ enterprise clients
• Audited and rebuilt the end-to-end billing system after identifying a 3-hour daily event tracking gap causing ~12.5% systematic revenue loss; implemented per-client rate card management, per-model AI usage billing (GPT-4, Claude, Gemini), and a full audit trail
• Architected the shared AWS Step Functions orchestration behind all WhatsApp, email, RCS and SMS broadcasts — one provider-agnostic delivery path where each channel previously had its own
• Hardened external webhook delivery into per-store Cloud Tasks isolation, with bounded retries and a rolling health evaluator that auto-blocks endpoints past a 50% failure rate — eliminating duplicate deliveries caused by ack-deadline overruns
• Own billing across every revenue channel. Drove SOC 2 Type 2 and ISO 27001 to certification alongside the CTO; company-wide AWS and GCP administration with org-level IAM ownership

VideoLAN (VLC)

2024

Google Summer of Code Developer

May – Oct 2024 | Remote

• Designed multi-file metadata editing subsystem in C++ and Qt—refactored legacy batch APIs, implemented undo/redo via command pattern, and built extensible metadata provider interface; reduced editing time by 75% for VLC’s 3B+ users
• Mentored directly by VLC founder Jean-Baptiste Kempf; collaborated on architectural decisions that influenced VLC’s long-term metadata infrastructure roadmap

MuseScore

2023

Google Summer of Code Developer

May – Oct 2023 | Remote

• Built reusable popup and inline text editing framework in C++ using Qt’s model-view architecture; shipped as flagship feature in MuseScore 4.6, used by 10M+ users globally
• Established extensible widget infrastructure patterns adopted by subsequent GSoC contributors across the codebase

[ 02. KEY ACHIEVEMENTS ]

Selected twice consecutively from <1% of applicants to contribute to high-impact open-source projects serving millions of users worldwide.

[ 03. OPEN SOURCE ]

Open Source Contributions

Contributing to projects used by millions worldwide

View GitHub

[ 04. IMPACT METRICS ]

User Reach

VLC Media Player

Time Saved

Multi-File Metadata Editing

Sync Failures

250+ Shopify Stores

Conversion

A/B Testing & Segmentation

Building systems that scale. Contributing code that matters. Creating impact that lasts.

[ 05. PROJECTS ]

Projects

Building tools that solve real problems and exploring new technologies.

Shell Zsh DX Tool

envswitch

Switch shell environments with a single command. No binaries, no hooks to approve, no .env files in your repos. Auto-loads by directory and git branch.

Chrome Extension JavaScript

YouTube Comments Search (Quack)

Browser extension for searching paginated YouTube comments using optimized inverted index with native-like UX

Python API

Google Trends API Toolkit

Reverse-engineered Google Trends with Python wrapper, REST API, CLI tools, and web dashboard for programmatic data access

Dart Flutter Research

Coloc - Roommate Finder

Mobile app using Gale-Shapley algorithm and Elo Rating System for optimal roommate matching. Published research paper in IJFMR

[ 06. TECH STACK ]

Technical Skills

The backend, data and cloud primitives I build production infrastructure out of every day.

Node.js Express

Event-Driven Message Queues

State Machines Orchestration

Microservices REST APIs

GCP Pub/Sub

Cloud Tasks Cloud Functions

AWS Step Functions

Kubernetes GKE

PostgreSQL SQL

Elasticsearch

Redis

Firestore

TypeScript JavaScript

Python

C++ Qt / QML

Docker CI/CD · Git

Also worked with

React · Redux — used for internal billing and configuration dashboards fronting the systems above.

[ 07. WRITING ]

Engineering Notes

Write-ups of production backend work

Draft · Distributed Systems

What 38 nodes were hiding

A Pub/Sub delivery backlog the team had been absorbing with hardware, and what actually fixed it: consumer flow control, ack-deadline handling and backpressure.

All writing