Technical Lead | Principal Engineer

Location: Bangalore, India
Contact: Email
LinkedIn: Nikhil Acharya Prakash
GitHub: niks3089

Summary

I am a seasoned Technical Leader and Software Engineer with over 13 years of experience in software development and product ownership. My expertise lies in creating, developing, maintaining and delivering high-quality and robust software products.

Technology Space: Solana, Distributed Systems, Cloud Native Services, Serverless, Systems Software, Networking
Languages: Rust, Golang, Python, JavaScript, C/C++
Leadership Skills: Hiring, Mentoring, Decision Making, Planning, Effective Communication

Experience

Helius, Bangalore - Founding Engineer/Principal Engineer (March 2023 - Present)

  • Led the initial efforts for User Management for the Helius Developer portal, which required a complete revamp of our management system.
  • Worked on indexing Solana’s cNFTs and NFTs as open standards and implemented several features like indexing regular tokens, token extensions and a new RWA indexer.
  • Implemented a global rate limiter and edge caching to rate limit and cache projects across the world.
  • Currently improving gRPC Solana WebSockets.

DigitalOcean, Bangalore - Engineering Manager/Technical Lead (September 2021 - February 2023)

  • Led a team responsible for integrating the Nimbella Serverless Platform into multiple regions as DigitalOcean Cloud Functions after the acquisition.
  • Built control plane services and APIs for deploying and managing Cloud Functions.
  • Delivered features such as Scheduled Functions and Serverless Function Eventing.

Nimbella, Bangalore - Founding Engineer/Technical Lead (September 2019 - August 2021)

  • Led the Nimbella integration effort with Netlify & Postman.
  • Managed the Integrations team to build Serverless Applications such as Commander for Slack & Microsoft Teams.
  • Integrated OpenWhisk API Gateway onto Nimbella Serverless Stack.

Arista, Bangalore - Member of Technical Staff (November 2017 - August 2019)

  • Developed network dissectors on Wireshark & Tcpdump for Arista proprietary protocol.
  • Implemented VRF and HA features for management interfaces on Arista switches.

IBM Research Centre, New York - Researcher (September 2018 - December 2018)

  • Conducted experiments and research on “Unikernels as processes,” leading to a paper publication in ACM SoCC Conference 2018.
  • Worked on running solo5 Unikernels as docker containers, eventually leading to the creation of Nabla containers.

Aryaka, Bangalore - Member of Technical Staff (July 2011 - September 2017)

  • Maintained & led the IP Acceleration Delivery Product Team.
  • Designed and developed features to improve resource utilization, bandwidth and connection throughput of Aryaka Cloud.
  • Developed protocols to support POP level redundancy, rate-limiting control plane packets and DDOS mitigation for IKE-V1.

Projects

IncludeOS (2018-2019):

  • Ported NodeJs and Dpdk to IncludeOS.
  • Implemented an IPv6 stack with C++ with basic support for ping, NDP and Autoconf.
  • Supported running IncludeOS on Solo5 as a base unikernel.

Solo5 (2018):

  • Implemented a feature to generate a core file when a unikernel application crashes.
  • Improved network bandwidth by 3x using shared memory between the application and the kernel in solo5.
  • Designed a network backend agnostic design where user APIs are agnostic to various network backends such as tap device, DPDK and netmap.

Hobby Projects:

  • TechShorts (2020): An app to view technical content and news.
  • CSPerf (2016): A performance tool to measure performance, bandwidth, latency, RTT and response time.
  • Android Apps (2011): Developed 5 educational apps and a trivia app with over 100k downloads.

Education

BITS Pilani, Bangalore, India - Master of Technology (2012 - 2014)

BMSCE, Bangalore, India - Bachelors of Engineering, Computer Science (2007 - 2011)