Hello, I'm

Ajith Nat.

I build and run systems that don’t break.

I enjoy solving hard systems problems and building software that works in the real world. I’m particularly interested in reliability, observability, and designing systems that scale beyond the happy path.

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About Me

I’m a Backend / Systems Engineer with 5+ years of experience building and operating reliable distributed systems in fast-paced startup environments. I’ve grown rapidly from an individual contributor into a Staff Software Engineer, with experience mentoring engineers and leading teams through critical technical decisions.

I’ve owned backend services, infrastructure, and Linux-based edge AI systems end-to-end—spanning deployment orchestration, backend APIs, and system observability across edge devices, on-prem data centers, and cloud environments. My work sits at the intersection of distributed systems, backend application development, and infrastructure, with a strong focus on operating software in production.

I don’t just write code — I think deeply about system design, failure modes, and long-term operability. With a strong foundation in computer science and systems engineering, I enjoy building scalable systems from the ground up and helping teams develop sound engineering practices.

When I’m not working, you’ll usually find me playing or watching soccer, hiking, skiing, traveling, working on a hobby project, or keeping up with the news — technology, politics, economics, and current affairs.

Based in Seattle, WA. Open to new opportunities!

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Experience

Staff Software Engineer – Infrastructure & Backend

Jan 2023 - Present
RadiusAI (Previously Senior Software Engineer, Software Engineer)
  • Growth & Leadership: Promoted twice within 2.5 years in recognition of ownership, execution, and technical leadership. Acted as team lead, mentoring engineers, setting technical direction, and leading hiring and onboarding for a growing engineering team.
  • Product & Business Impact: Led engineering efforts to deploy and scale ShopAssist™ and ShopAssist™ Plus, an AI-powered frictionless checkout and real-time inventory management platform adopted by Fortune 500 retailers. Took end-to-end technical ownership during the critical 0-to-1 (MVP) phase, scaling the system from pilot deployments to a revenue-generating, enterprise-grade product used across hundreds of retail stores.
  • Strategic Leadership & Product Delivery: Designed and built the system architecture from initial RFP and MVP through large-scale production deployments, supporting rollouts across 100+ store locations. Drove cross-functional collaboration between Engineering, Product, Operations, and external clients to translate ambiguous business requirements into executable technical roadmaps and deliver on aggressive startup timelines.
  • Backend, Edge & Infrastructure Engineering: Built and owned backend services and REST APIs supporting deployment orchestration, telemetry, and product workflows for thousands of Linux-based edge devices. Designed and operated resilient edge-to-cloud infrastructure spanning low-level Linux systems (Ubuntu, openSUSE), on-prem production servers, and Azure cloud, including a Kafka-based store-and-forward streaming architecture to reliably push data from on-device Kafka to cloud Kafka under intermittent connectivity. Designed and implemented production networking from scratch, including Cloudflare-managed ingress (DNS, Zero Trust, WAF), VPNs, and site-to-site connectivity, supporting multi-region retail deployments.
  • Observability & Reliability: Implemented company-wide observability using OpenObserve and Vector across edge hardware, Kafka data pipelines, and backend services, enabling proactive monitoring and alerting and helping achieve 99.99% uptime for in-store checkout systems in production environments.
GitHub Activity
GitHub Activity 2025
View on GitHub

Cloud Development Engineer

Apr 2021 - Nov 2022
Pegasystems
  • Contributed to the design and release process of Pega Cloud 3.x.
  • Implemented end-to-end automation for complex build and release workflows.
  • Led an initiative to shut down stale cloud accounts, resulting in over $1M/year in cost savings.
  • Automated cleanup of development artifacts, reclaiming 75TB+ of storage.
  • Resolved approximately 80% of SEV1 production incidents owned by the team.

Cloud Development Engineer Intern

May 2020 - Dec 2020
Pegasystems
  • Developed Terraform-based automation for Kubernetes cluster provisioning and Jenkins deployment.
  • Built proof-of-concepts for continuous deployment tools, reducing manual effort by 12% and lowering operational costs.

Software Engineer - Bharati Script

Aug 2018 - Jul 2019
Indian Institute of Technology, Madras
Designed and built AI-powered systems to support Bharati, a unified script for major Indian languages, spanning computer vision, OCR, mobile applications, and applied machine learning.
  • Led a team of three engineers to develop a CNN-based finger-spelling recognition system, achieving 93% accuracy on a novel Bharati dataset.
  • Designed and implemented an OCR engine for a new Bharati font with 97.5% character-level accuracy.
  • Built a Bharati Handwriting Keyboard Android application using an SVM-based classifier to convert Bharati keystrokes into target language characters.
  • Developed a Bharati transliteration Android application to transliterate Indian scripts into Bharati, enabling tourists to read signboards and public text across languages.
  • Co-developed Bharati JumbleTumble, a mobile board game to promote learning and adoption of the Bharati script.
  • Rebuilt bharatiscript.com from scratch to support outreach and documentation efforts.
  • Played a key role in securing a $44,400 MoU with Tata Consultancy Services (TCS) to support further development and research.
  • Some magazines where my work has been covered: Times of India (English), The Hindu (English), Sakshi (Telugu).

Software Engineer Intern

Dec 2017 - Jul 2018
Zoho Corporation
  • Worked on backend system integration for file format conversion (CSV, XLS to Java objects).
  • Awarded Best Intern (2017–2018) for performance and impact.

Education

Master of Science - Computer Science

2019 - 2021
University at Buffalo, SUNY

Relevant coursework include Distributed Systems, Computational Science, Algorithms, Linear Algebra, Computer Vision and Image Processing, Machine Learning, Information Retrieval, Pattern Recognition, Decision Analysis

Bachelor of Science - Electrical Engineering

2014 - 2018
Madras Institute of Technology, Anna University (Thesis completed at Indian Institute of Technology, Madras)

Relevant coursework include Data Structures and Algorithms, Object-Oriented Programming, Computing Techniques, Digital Image Processing, Embedded Systems, Microprocessors, Microcontrollers, Integrated Circuits, Digital Logic Theory, Digital Signal Processing, Control Engineering, Process Control, Thermodynamics and Fluid Theory

Featured Projects

(Selected academic and personal projects)

DynamoDB-Style Replicated Key-Value Store
Designed and implemented a persistent key–value storage system inspired by Amazon DynamoDB, supporting replication across multiple nodes with failure detection and recovery.
Java Distributed Systems Replication
Group Messenger with Total Order Guarantees
Built a fault-tolerant multicast messaging system providing FIFO and total order delivery using the ISIS algorithm, resilient to application failures.
Java Distributed Systems Multicast ISIS Algorithm
Chord Distributed Hash Table
Implemented a Chord-based distributed hash table supporting ID space partitioning, ring-based routing, and dynamic node joins and departures.
Java Distributed Systems DHT Chord
Information Retrieval System
Developed a full-stack information retrieval system deployed on AWS, using LDA for topic modeling and NLP-based sentiment analysis on a large Twitter corpus.
Python AWS NLP Solr
KinShield (Hackathon)
Built a COVID recovery and hygiene tracking portal for children, with automated vaccine reminders and notifications for adults.
Python GCP Firebase
Home Management IoT System
Designed an IoT system to monitor household products and automatically add items to a shopping cart using the Wegmans API.
Python IoT API
Pega Hackathon – Cloud Quota Monitoring Bot
Created a cloud quota monitoring bot that alerted teams to usage limits and enabled one-click quota increase requests.
Cloud Automation Bot
Panoramic Image Builder
Implemented an image stitching pipeline using Harris corner detection, SIFT feature matching, and RANSAC-based homography estimation.
Python OpenCV Computer Vision
Fashion-MNIST CNN
Built custom neural networks (85% accuracy) and CNN models using Keras (92% accuracy), incorporating batch normalization and dropout for improved performance.
Python TensorFlow Keras Deep Learning

Technical Skills

Languages

  • Python
  • Shell Scripting
  • Java
  • Rust

Backend & Systems

  • Distributed Systems
  • Backend Services & REST APIs
  • Networking
  • Observability & Monitoring
  • Kafka
  • Linux (Ubuntu, openSUSE)

Cloud & DevOps

  • AWS · Azure · GCP
  • Kubernetes (k8s, k3s) · Docker · Helm
  • Cloudflare
  • CI/CD (GitHub Actions, Jenkins)
  • Infrastructure as Code (Terraform)

AI / ML & Observability

  • OpenObserve · Vector
  • PyTorch · TensorFlow · Keras
  • OpenCV

Web & Developer Tools

  • HTML · CSS · JavaScript
  • Git · GitHub
  • Android Studio

Microcontrollers

  • Raspberry Pi
  • Arduino Uno
  • Arduino Mega

Certifications & Training

Recommendations

Prof. Srinivasa Chakravarthy

Professor (Manager) @ IIT Madras

"Ajith is one of the best research students I have had an opportunity to work with over the last decade. It is enough if you ask him to do something – he would go at it with complete commitment... He is a constant learner and reads extensively."

"With full faith in his intelligence, hard work and personality, I strongly recommend him for any role offered to him."

Tyler Lee

Team Lead @ RadiusAI

"Ajith is a highly skilled engineer who has an incredible ability to digest and comprehend even the most complicated tasks... I would be pleased to have him on any team I work with in the future."

Pedro Ivo Raimundo

Teammate @ Pegasystems

"Ajith is a brilliant engineer, and a great person. He is one of the most talented developers I've worked with, and truly a hardworking colleague, always pushing for the best outcomes."

John Biron

Tech Architect @ Pegasystems

"Ajith demonstrated both a willingness and eagerness to jump into unfamiliar territory... He continues to have a measurable positive effect on achieving the team goals even though he is part-time."

Carlos M. Gonzales

Manager @ Pegasystems

"He has engaged and collaborated with the team well... The team appreciated his contribution to the overall team goals... He presented a couple of presentations to the department VP which went well."

Aravind Ram

Manager @ Zoho Corp

"Ajith is an excellent programmer who enjoys and excels in a work environment. He is a team player... It has been a pleasure to manage Ajith as he always knew the priorities and does the work on time."

Maria Łysik

Teammate @ Pegasystems

"I strongly recommend Ajith as a co-worker. He's disciplined, dedicated, open-minded, improvement-focused and easy-going person."

Get In Touch

Currently leading the engineering effort at RadiusAI. Whether it’s a hobby project, an early-stage startup ideas, a complex system architecture, or a new professional opportunity, I’m always open to a deep-dive technical discussion.

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