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venky.

VenkateshPinninti.

Four years inside a hypergrowth startup, scaling a checkout platform from 100 merchants to 10,000 at 100k+ requests a minute. I ship fast without a playbook, and I bring the discipline that stops fast from turning fragile: SLAs, staged rollouts, rollback plans, and monitoring that fires before customers notice.

Shipping in AmbiguityDistributed SystemsReliability at ScaleEngineering Standards
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Bengaluru, IndiaCurrently at Imagine Learning
100→0k

merchants scaled

carried through hypergrowth

0k+

requests / minute

under strict latency and availability SLAs

Zero

downtime migrations

every cutover shipped with a rollback

0 yrs

building backends

Node.js, Go, Java

01 / About

Where I'm useful

I spent four years at GoKwik while it grew from a hundred merchants to ten thousand. Most weeks there was no playbook: requirements moved, traffic climbed, and calls had to be made with half the information. I learned to ship anyway.

What I took from it is that speed and rigor aren't a trade-off. Every migration I ran had a rollback plan. Every critical path had a latency budget and an alert. Code and design review happened even when the deadline was tomorrow, because that's what let us keep shipping the day after.

Now I'm a staff engineer at Imagine Learning, on platforms used in classrooms at scale, bringing the same mix: move quickly, and leave behind systems and processes the next engineer can trust.

Special 26 Award

GoKwik

Top 26 contributors company-wide, for high-impact system-level innovation.

Rising Star Award

Newgen Software Technologies

Exceptional early impact as a new joiner.

02 / Approach

Startup speed, big-system discipline

How I work when there's no playbook and the system still has to hold.

01

Ship the smallest reversible thing

Most calls are made with half the information. Keeping them small and reversible is what makes moving fast safe.

02

No migration without a rollback

Dual-writes, shadow reads, staged cutovers. If a step can't be undone, it isn't ready to run on live traffic.

03

Monitor before you need to

The alert, the dashboard and the fallback go in with the feature, not after the first incident.

04

Standards scale, heroics don't

Code review, design review and written runbooks, even under deadline. That's what lets a small team keep shipping.

03 / Experience

Six years on systems that can't go down

  1. Staff Engineer · Imagine Learning

    Aug 2026 - Present
    • Staff-level ownership of backend platform work: architecture, scalability and reliability for products used in classrooms at scale.
    .NETC#Node.jsTypeScriptAWS

  2. Software Development Engineer II · GoKwik

    Dec 2023 - Aug 2026
    • Designed and ran services sustaining 100k+ requests per minute, under strict SLAs for latency, availability and consistency.
    • Led the extraction of customer and address handling from the monolith while it served live traffic. Chose a dual-write and shadow-read migration with a staged cutover and rollback at every step: zero downtime, better fault isolation and response times.
    • Built a real-time failure-monitoring service on EKS, Kafka and MongoDB that spots anomalies before users feel them, then automatically downgrades non-critical features and routes to fallbacks, so checkout degrades instead of failing.
    • End-to-end ownership of mission-critical services: performance tuning, cost and operational-overhead reduction, and production incident response.
    • Drove engineering quality across the team through code review and architectural evaluation.
    Node.jsTypeScriptGoKafkaRedisMongoDBAWS

  3. Software Development Engineer I · GoKwik

    Apr 2022 - Nov 2023
    • Redesigned the logging structure, sharply reducing the time to trace a production issue.
    • Introduced production guardrails on my own initiative, and they surfaced bugs that were already hurting customers.
    • Shaped new product features by turning business gaps into technical proposals with PMs and stakeholders.
    Node.jsNestJSMongoDBRedisShopify

  4. Software Engineer Trainee → Software Engineer · Newgen Software Technologies

    Jan 2020 - Apr 2022
    • Supplier Portal: designed and built a full-stack application in Node.js and React enabling suppliers to raise invoices and take part in bidding.
    • Invoice processing: built a pipeline to extract and normalise JSON data from QR codes, streamlining invoice handling.
    • Developed data-processing modules in Java and JavaScript to merge and enrich document data from multiple OCR engines, improving accuracy and fault tolerance.
    Node.jsReactJavaJavaScript

04 / Selected work

Things I've built and kept running

A few systems where the interesting part wasn't writing the code. It was making it survive production.

Pre-impact detection

Real-Time Failure Monitoring

An anomaly detector that degrades a product gracefully instead of failing it.

Built on EKS, Kafka and MongoDB. Watches live signals in real time, and on degradation automatically downgrades non-critical features and routes to fallbacks, so the flow completes rather than errors. Protects revenue during incidents.

The callDegrade non-critical features automatically instead of waiting for a human. A slower checkout beats a failed one.

KafkaEKSMongoDBGo
0 downtime

Zero-Downtime Monolith Decomposition

Extracted customer and address handling into its own service, live, with no downtime.

Dual-write and shadow-read migration with a staged cutover and rollback at every step. Improved fault isolation and response times without a maintenance window for anyone on the platform.

The callNo maintenance window, so every step had to be reversible. Slower to ship, but never a moment we couldn't back out of.

MicroservicesPostgreSQLMigration
100k+ RPM

High-Throughput Commerce Platform

Core ecommerce infrastructure running at 100k+ requests per minute.

Latency, availability and consistency SLAs held while the platform grew from a hundred merchants to ten thousand. Work spanned service decomposition, caching strategy, and the operational tooling around releases.

The callHold the SLAs while the merchant count grew 100x, rather than rewrite and hope. Scale the parts that hurt, when they hurt.

Node.jsTypeScriptAWS ECSRedis

Personal Site

This site. Designed and built solo.

Next.js App Router, Tailwind, and a motion layer built around a CSS 3D orbit, scroll-linked reveals and magnetic controls. Fully keyboard navigable and honours prefers-reduced-motion.

Next.jsReactTailwindCSS 3D

05 / Stack

What I reach for

Node.jsTypeScriptGoKafkaRedisPostgreSQLMongoDBDockerKubernetesAWSNestJSReactNext.jsJava

Languages

  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • Go
  • Java
  • SQL

Backend

  • Node.js
  • NestJS
  • Express
  • REST APIs
  • Microservices

Data

  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB
  • Redis
  • MSSQL
  • Athena

Streaming & Infra

  • Kafka
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • AWS ECS
  • AWS EKS

AWS

  • Lambda
  • Step Functions
  • S3
  • RDS
  • CloudWatch

Frontend

  • React
  • Next.js
  • Redux
  • Tailwind CSS

05 / Contact

Let's build something that holds

I'm looking for teams that move like a startup and want to build like they'll be big: backend foundations, reliability, and the engineering bar that lets a small team ship quickly without breaking things.

Bengaluru, India