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About

Who I am, what I work on, and what I care about technically.

I’m Prateek Sharma — a backend and systems engineer with 10+ years of experience. I build services and infrastructure where correctness, reliability, and scale matter more than surface area: API design, data modelling, workflow orchestration, and the observability to keep it all honest.

What I work on

Backend systems, distributed systems, databases, and the infrastructure around them. Concretely, that has meant:

  • Data & integrations — parsing and reconciling on-chain data across several blockchains, multi-tenant PostgreSQL schema design, full-text search, and Excel/S3 ingestion pipelines.
  • Fault-tolerant workflows — Temporal-orchestrated, idempotent sync jobs with reconciliation and validation instead of best-effort scripts.
  • Real-time systems — poker game and tournament engines handling thousands of concurrent players with event-driven, low-latency backends.
  • Platform work — migrations (PHP → Node.js, services → Django, serverless booking engines), RBAC and identity, and observability with OpenTelemetry.

What I care about technically

Systems that fail loudly and recover cleanly. Schemas that make illegal states hard to represent. APIs that are boring to use. Enough observability to answer “what happened?” without redeploying. Libraries small enough to understand in one sitting.

Background

I started in September 2014 as a graduate trainee at Adda52, a real-money poker platform, and have since worked in transport/travel tech, B2B SaaS, and crypto/fintech, on teams from 4 to 40+ people. Along the way I’ve worked across Java, Node.js/TypeScript, Python, and — more recently — Go, with PostgreSQL, Redis, AWS, Docker, and Kubernetes underneath.

Currently exploring

Go and systems internals, through small hobby projects: a concurrency-safe room/user library, exchange API connectors, and a handful of CLI and media tools. See Projects for those, Experience for the professional history, and the Blog for the longer write-ups.

Off-screen: books and calisthenics.

Elsewhere