• Engineering Manager
• Distributed systems enthusiast

• 🇬🇧 Based in the UK (London / Maidenhead orbit)
• 🏢 Engineering Manager @ Meltwater
• 🏗️ ~15+ years building backend and data systems
• 🎓 MSc Computer Science (Distinction), University of Edinburgh
• 🧵 I write occasionally when something bugs me enough → jairam.dev

• 🌐 https://jairam.dev — longer thoughts, fewer hot takes
• 🐙 https://github.com/jairamc — code and experiments
• 🐘 @voltaicracer@mastodon.social — occasional signals into the void

• Design and run cloud-native systems for large-scale data extraction
• Lead teams that ship production systems (and survive them)
• Translate: vague idea → architecture → running system → pager alerts → fixes → lessons
• Balance engineering, people, and the occasional reality check

If it stores, streams, or shards data, I’ve probably broken it at least once:

• Hadoop, HDFS, Hive
• Cassandra, HBase
• Kafka, RabbitMQ
• Elasticsearch

Built systems dealing with TB-scale data per day and the kind of edge cases that only show up at 3am.

• Java
• Scala
• Python

• AWS (EC2, ECS, Lambda, RDS)
• Docker
• Terraform

• Distributed systems
• Data pipelines
• Backend services

• Meltwater – Principal Engineer → Team Lead → Engineering Manager
  • Built ML-driven content extraction systems on AWS
• QuantumBlack (McKinsey) – Platform Engineer
  • Backend systems for data science platforms (Scala, Spark, Mesos)
• Datasift – Big Data Engineer → Team Lead
  • Worked on systems processing ~2TB/day of social data
• Microsoft (earlier life) – Software Development Engineer
  • Learned things properly the first time (mostly)

🧩 Engineering Beliefs

• Distributed systems are just failure modes wearing APIs
• Scale reveals design flaws with theatrical timing
• Most “technical” problems are coordination problems
• If it’s not observable, it’s already broken (you just don’t know yet)