I’m Shailesh.
I’ve spent five years building the kind of software people depend on without thinking about it — payment systems that process money at 3 AM, healthcare APIs doctors use between patients, privacy tools that find sensitive data before anyone else does. I’m based in India, and I’ve worked with teams across four time zones.
When I’m not writing code, I’m re-reading Kleppmann’s DDIA for the third time, tinkering with Rust, or trying to explain to my family what exactly it is I do.
The best systems disappear. You stop thinking about them, and start thinking about what you’re building on top of them. That’s the goal.
How I got here
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Saltmine
2025–PresentSenior Full Stack Engineer
I joined to build their occupancy planning platform from scratch. Fortune 500 companies were spending weeks on what should take hours. Six months later, the system I built handles it.
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CommandK
2023–2024Founding Engineer
Founding engineer at a data privacy startup. I helped build an AI that could scan your entire codebase and find every piece of personal data hiding in it — credit cards in log files, emails in debug dumps, the works.
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Mensari
2022–2023Software Engineer
The old blockchain monitoring system polled every wallet every five minutes. I replaced it with event-driven webhooks across eight chains. Sub-second notifications instead of five-minute delays.
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Clipboard Health
2022Software Engineer
Two million healthcare documents needed to move from Cloudinary to S3. One month, zero downtime. Nobody noticed — which was exactly the point.
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Cerner (Oracle Health)
2020–2022Software Engineer
My first real engineering job. Built FHIR-compliant APIs and a clinical document viewer used by actual doctors in actual hospitals. That’s when I learned what “production” really means.
Hard-won lessons
Own the whole problem.
I’d rather take a problem from requirements through architecture, implementation, testing, and production monitoring than hand it off halfway. Fewer handoffs, fewer misunderstandings, better software.
Write before you code.
Not because someone told me to, but because I’ve seen what happens when you don’t. The design doc isn’t bureaucracy; it’s where the actual thinking happens.
The right abstraction beats the right implementation.
I’ll spend a disproportionate amount of time on the data model because I know it’ll save everyone grief for the next three years.
If you can’t observe it, you don’t understand it.
Logging, tracing, and alerting go in the design phase, not the week after the outage. Observability isn’t a feature — it’s a prerequisite.
What drives me
I believe in end-to-end ownership — from understanding the problem to monitoring the solution in production.
I care about systems that are observable, maintainable, and built for the humans who use them.
I’m drawn to hard infrastructure problems where the right abstraction unlocks everything downstream.
Where it started
Amrita School of Engineering
B.Tech in Computer Science & Engineering
2016–2020Four years of foundations — algorithms, operating systems, databases, networks. The kind of CS education that gives you the vocabulary to learn everything that comes after.
If you’ve read this far, we should probably talk.
I’m always interested in hard problems and good conversations — especially the kind where someone says “we need this built” and nobody quite knows how yet.