Hey, I’m Balaji
I’m a Senior Software Developer at SurveySparrow who builds and scales backend systems — APIs, distributed services, performance, and reliability. Over 3.5+ years I’ve taken products from 0 to 1 and kept them fast and boringly stable in production.
My proving ground has been one of the least forgiving domains: payments and billing. I built the platform from scratch, scaled it across the product suite, and have kept it at 2+ years of zero downtime — while cutting p99 latency 98%, external API calls 95% (caching + batching), and core API response 30%. When money can’t be wrong and can’t go down, the engineering discipline transfers to everything else.
Most recently I built an agentic translation pipeline on a custom multi-model architecture. I work mostly in Node.js, TypeScript, Python, PostgreSQL and Redis — and I write about backend systems, distributed architecture, and the trade-offs behind real production infrastructure.
Build and scale backend systems across products — APIs, performance, reliability. Shipped an agentic translation pipeline; cut API calls 95% and p99 98% on the payments platform.
Launched the billing product from the ground up. A zero-downtime rollout earned the Q4’23 People’s Choice Award.
Built the centralized billing system from scratch and stood up observability with New Relic, Grafana & CloudWatch.