I'm best known as a Computer Engineer or an Engineer @ Heart.
Twenty-two years in, and I still get a quiet thrill when a distributed system holds steady under pressure. No war room. No escalation. Just the system doing exactly what it was designed to do. That feeling never gets old.
My career has been a long, deliberate journey through the stack - from writing 4G/10G Linux network device driver in the kernel, to building a PCI-compliant Payment Gateway from scratch, to architecting a scheduling engine that fired 60 million time-sensitive reminders daily for 150M users. The common thread across all of it: I like being in the code, close to the problem, where the real decisions get made.
I'm a committed Individual Contributor - not by default, but by choice. I've found that the best leverage I have is staying technically deep while thinking architecturally wide. People management is a craft I respect enormously; it's just not mine.
I recently joined Cohesity as a Staff Software Engineer, stepping into the data security and resilience space. After nearly a decade building payments infrastructure at PhonePe - where reliability wasn't a feature, it was the product - this felt like a natural evolution. Different domain, same obsession: systems that don't break when it matters most.
Outside work, I write about distributed systems, engineering culture, and the occasional hard lesson at pradeepdalvi.com/blogs - usually through analogies involving the human body, because it turns out evolution solved most of our architecture problems first.
If you're thinking about resilience engineering, distributed systems design, or just want to geek out about something low-level - I'm always up for that conversation.
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