[ Staff Software Engineer ]/v.2026

Arjun Patel

I build reliable distributed systems and the tooling teams need to ship them.

12+
Years
40
Projects
99.9%
Uptime

0 yrs

In production

0+

Projects shipped

0+

GitHub stars

99.95%

Uptime hit rate

Tech stack

What I build with

Day-to-day tools and frameworks I reach for.

Go01
TypeScript02
PostgreSQL03
Kubernetes04
OpenTelemetry05
gRPC06
Terraform07
Redis08
The difference

Built to last. Engineered to perform.

  1. Production-tested

    Every system shipped is operating under real traffic — not a demo, not a prototype.

  2. Observability-first

    OpenTelemetry, structured logs, and SLOs from day one. Incidents have data trails.

  3. Postgres-native

    Most outages are database problems. We treat the DB as the system of record, not an afterthought.

  4. Open-source contributor

    Patches upstreamed, RFCs in the public eye. You see the work before you hire it.

How an engagement runs
  1. 01

    Discovery

    A week reviewing the existing system, on-calls, and recent incidents.

  2. 02

    Design

    Architecture decision records and an explicit migration plan reviewed with the team.

  3. 03

    Engineer

    Pair-coding on the riskiest changes; PRs split for safe review.

  4. 04

    Build

    Feature-flagged rollouts with metric-driven gates.

  5. 05

    Deliver

    Operational runbooks, on-call playbooks, and a written postmortem of the engagement.

Selected work

Projects

3 pieces selected.

Gallery
  • Tracebridge

    Tracebridge

    Lightweight OpenTelemetry collector with smarter sampling. Adopted by 30+ engineering teams.

  • pg-hot-shards

    pg-hot-shards

    Postgres extension for online resharding without downtime. Talk at PGCon 2024.

  • incident-replay

    incident-replay

    Internal tool used at $WORK to replay past production incidents in a safe sandbox.

Key engineers

The people on the engagement

  1. Arjun Patel

    Arjun Patel

    Staff Software Engineer

    Distributed systems, observability, Go, Postgres.

    11 yrs

    • Go
    • OTel
    • Postgres
    View work →
  2. Mira Chen

    Mira Chen

    Senior SRE

    Incident review, capacity planning, K8s reliability.

    9 yrs

    • CKA
    • OTel
  3. Yusuf Diallo

    Yusuf Diallo

    Platform Engineer

    Build systems, CI/CD, developer experience.

    7 yrs

    • Bazel
    • Buildkite
About

The work, in their words.

Years
11+

Arjun is a Staff Software Engineer who has spent the last decade making large backend systems faster, safer, and more legible to the humans who run them. He has led on platform reliability at two unicorn startups and contributed to several widely-used open-source libraries in the Go ecosystem. His writing and conference talks focus on the operational side of software — incident review, observability, and team cognitive load.

Experience

Background

Where I’ve worked, sorted newest first.

  1. Staff Software Engineer

    2022 → Now

    Drift Systems

    Current role

  2. Senior Backend Engineer

    2018 – 2022

    Layer Cake

  3. Software Engineer

    2014 – 2018

    Northstar Health

PGCON 2024 · 14 MIN

How Tracebridge handles 30k spans/sec

Lightning talk on smarter sampling for OpenTelemetry collectors.

In production at
Drift Systems
Layer Cake
Northstar Health
Postgres
OpenTelemetry
Kubernetes
Vercel
Get in touch
Open to work

Let's build something good.

Reach out about projects, collaborations, or to talk about working with Arjun Patel. Replies usually within a day.

Email

arjun@arjunbuilds.dev

Send a message→
AP

Arjun Patel

I build reliable distributed systems and the tooling teams need to ship them.

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