AU

Aakarshit Uppal

Platform Tech Lead committed to building efficient and functional systems that scale.

About

As a platform tech lead, I specialize in building frameworks and architecting large systems. I strive to create environments where people can do their best work, and have led multiple teams in delivering successful projects. Recognized as a Subject-Matter Expert in backend development with JVM and technologies such as Kafka, Redis, RabbitMQ, and Kubernetes, I'm currently expanding my expertise in distributed systems and systems programming with Rust.

Work Experience

99acres (Info Edge)

Apr 2023 - Present

Tech Lead

Exceptional Achiever Award
Gold Team Award
  • Transforming 99acres to a video-powered platform by building in-house solutions for automated video creation, seamless user uploads, and optimized serving and playback for videos.
  • Eliminated malicious crawling by coordinating platform-wide changes and developing novel login-less authentication mechanisms using hardware and software signals.
  • Led the first post-Kubernetes disaster recovery drill, planning and executing the bring up of the entire 99acres infrastructure on AWS, ensuring a seamless switch from our data center to AWS.

99acres (Info Edge)

Oct 2021 - Apr 2023

Lead Engineer

Gold Team Award
  • Created GAIA v2 to accelerate backend development with declarative upstream (DB, MQ, cache, functions) orchestration supporting different triggers (HTTP, MQ, cron) – enabling quick delivery of capability and stack upgrades across microservices.
  • Reduced platform incidents from frequent to very rare by enabling Kubernetes migration through extensive JVM resource tuning, integrating resilience and observability primitives in microservices, and selectively introducing the reactive stack.
  • Led an 8-member Platform Backend team spearheading initiatives like in-house Zuul replacement, crawler-network ID, and WebP format rollout for all user images.

99acres (Info Edge)

Apr 2020 - Oct 2021

Senior Software Engineer

Gold Team Award
  • Built GAIA, a stateless, declarative API aggregation framework – eliminating boilerplate and fast-tracking API aggregation for all public endpoints and content for outgoing campaigns.
  • Built a unified, multichannel campaign management platform supporting flexible fund allocation with a built-in wallet.
  • Mentored developers and maintained multiple microservices in anti-crawling and media systems.

99acres (Info Edge)

Jun 2019 - Apr 2020

Software Engineer

Top Gun Award
  • Built near-real-time crawling detection pipelines and low latency security microservices with Spring Boot and Kafka.
  • Maintained and evolved central media management services.
  • Helped develop dockerization scripts for Spring applications.

Education

Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra

Jul 2015 - May 2019

Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science

  • President @ IET On Campus, BIT Mesra Chapter.
  • Founder @ Hack-A-BIT, BIT Mesra's National Hackathon.
  • Developed and released two Android applications for technical and cultural fests.

Technical Proficiencies

Software Architecture
System Design
Distributed Systems
Kafka
RabbitMQ
Redis
MySQL
MongoDB
Spring Boot
Java
Kotlin
Rust
Python
Docker
Kubernetes
Nginx
Android