Software engineerStorage and distributed systemsBengaluru
Tap the lid, a drive, or the lights
Farhan Conf · 2013 to 2026 · Bengaluru
Talks on the wall open each job’s world. Passes take you down the stack.
Layer 01 · Interface
Associate engineer · 2013 to 2014
Where it started: enterprise portals, built by hand.
Layer 02 · Product APIs and access
Infrastructure lead · 2015 to 2017
Who may do what, and money that has to add up.
Layer 03 · Data pipelines and caches
Data engineering lead · 2017 to 2019
An auction in under 500 ms, half a billion times a day.
Layer 04 · Membership and replication
Senior engineer · 2019 to 2021
Routers that agree without asking a primary.
Layer 05 · Platform and orchestration
Senior engineer · 2021 to 2022
One platform every team deployed to, under every compliance rule.
Layer 06 · Database internals
immudb · 2022 to 2023
Deleting data from a database built to prove nothing changed.
Layer 07 · Storage engine and key-value
Storage team lead · 2023 to 2026
The engine at the bottom: where the bytes finally land.
Each role, a layer deeper
How I work · 1
A customer whose queries are slow. A team whose upgrades keep breaking. A system that falls over under load. I find the person first, and ask what "fixed" would look like to them.
How I work · 2
What must the system guarantee? Where does the time actually go? Which constraints are real, and which are just how it has always been done? Tools come last.
How I work · 3
Customers live on what is already running, so most days the right fix is a careful one: a simpler design, a better data layout, an upgrade nobody has to dread. Some problems outgrow their foundations, and then I build from scratch, the way the storage engine at SurrealDB was. Knowing which day it is, is the job.
How I work · 4
Gossip membership, real-time bidding, distributed transactions: I read the original papers and write a small version myself before I depend on someone else's. It is how I have moved between industries without starting from zero.
Then I own the outcome, in production.
Agents write the code. Proofs decide.
Code is cheap now: an agent writes a thousand lines before lunch. Knowing they are right is not. So I start from what must always be true. A TLA+ model checks the design before any code exists, and a stack of correctness and quality checks holds the code to it: proofs where it matters most, property and mutation tests, and deterministic simulation. The agents write; the checks decide. It is the loop I build with every day, and it holds.
\* what must always be true
Inv == \A t \in Txns :
Committed(t) => Durable(t)Model checking: 0 of 28 distinct states
Home, and the base for every role since 2013. Rain trees, filter coffee, and the city best seen from a bike.
From Bengaluru, with teams in London and the US
Hours in Bengaluru time. Shaded: where your working day meets mine.
Away from storage engines · selected design work
01 / 03
Thirteen years, seven companies. Each machine is what the job was really about. Open one to step inside its world.
More on GitHub: flashdb, chord, art, merkletree and other systems papers, built small.
Led storage. Built SurrealKV, an LSM-tree store in Rust, put object storage under it, and tested the distributed transactional store with DST.
Data retention in an immutable database where proofs and storage are interlinked, plus compaction and key-value performance.
Operators for a multi-cloud, multi-tenant Kubernetes platform under PCI, HIPAA and FedRAMP High.
Moved firewall config from one primary pushing to every router, to a gossip mesh that sends only what differs.
Real-time bidding for 500 million ad requests a day, and the first data pipelines: Kafka to BigQuery at 2 TB a day.
Scaled the infrastructure, ran the MySQL databases under payment transactions, and exported expenses to SAP, Oracle, QuickBooks and Tally.
Custom SharePoint solutions for enterprise clients: web parts, workflows, event receivers and timer jobs.
Systems look better on a bigger screen
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