Headline

Building tech @Fampay (YC’19) | Ex TakeUforward, Grapevine | GSoC at JSON Schema | IIIT Ranchi

About

Hi, I am Alok Gupta, a software engineer who loves building things that people actually use. I learn best by doing. I like to build systems from scratch, break them, fix them, and make them better. Working on real products and real problems is how I grow as an engineer. I have worked on backend systems that are used by thousands of users every day. At takeUforward, I built a testcase serializer and deserializer system by deeply studying and reverse engineering how the LeetCode style code execution engine works. This system handles arrays, 2D arrays, strings, numbers, trees, and graphs, and processes around one point five million submissions every month. I also built a feature that shows exactly which testcase failed during code submission, which helped users debug faster. I contributed to the launch of TUF version two and version three, which are now used daily by thousands of learners. At Grapevine Round1 AI, I worked on real production systems. I built a scalable payment system with PhonePe integration using Django queues, set up master slave database replication, and worked through real world issues that came with syncing data. I also built a SQL based recommendation system to help recruiters find the most relevant candidates. I was also a Google Summer of Code 2024 contributor with JSON Schema Orgs, where I improved CI and testing pipelines using GitHub Actions, Cypress, Codecov, and Cloudflare. This included building workflows for testing, deployments, and community operations. I enjoy backend engineering, system design, and building reliable systems that can scale to millions of users. I like taking ownership, asking questions, and understanding how things work end to end. My goal is to keep building impactful systems and someday work on products that are used by millions or even billions of people Thank you! Happy coding! ❤️ Want to know more about me : https://github.com/aialok

Location

Kushinagar

AI stack

opencode

claudecode

Work experience

Software Engineer : Payments at Fam, Jul 2026 - Present · 2 mos, - Integrated Factlib, our in-house open-source event publishing library, into payment transaction workflows to enable reliable inter-service communication using the Outbox Pattern. - Leveraged PostgreSQL's "pg_logical_emit_message" and logical decoding to publish transaction state changes to Kafka with at-least-once delivery guarantees, ensuring downstream services remain consistent with the source of truth.

Software Engineer Intern at Fam, Jan 2026 - Jul 2026 · 7 mos, Team - Payments and Core Banking Built the offline reverse geocoding infrastructure at FamApp to process 10M+ location lookups daily across India with 99.996% success rate and ultra low latency (p99 < 0.005 ms). Designed a fully offline geospatial indexing system using H3 and OpenStreetMap data, and open sourced the core technology as Lakhua. https://github.com/aialok/lakhua Built an internal shadow testing tool with a lightweight UI to compare and validate responses between legacy and migrated APIs using real production traffic, enabling safer backend service rollouts. Resolved multiple critical production issues across backend systems, including fixing a major NATS memory leak that reduced memory consumption by ~94%. Investigated recurring OOM failures, wrote RCAs for legacy system issues, and implemented multiple stability and reliability improvements across the infrastructure.

Software Engineer at Grapevine Round1 AI, Aug 2025 - Nov 2025 · 4 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, - Built a scalable payment system with PhonePe integration using Django queues, ensuring fast and reliable end-to-end order creation and processing. - Implemented a SQL-based recommendation feed that delivers the most relevant candidates to recruiters, improving targeting and engagement.

Software Engineer at takeUforward, May 2025 - Aug 2025 · 4 mos, - Built end to end API monitoring using Prometheus and Grafana with request count, request rate, error rate, and latency percentiles (P50) (P90) (P95) (P99) per API endpoint. - Designed and built the interview platform end-to-end, handling architecture, APIs, database schema, system design, frontend, and backend to make interview stories easy to read and share. Check it out here: https://takeuforward.org/interview

Maintainer, Triage Team Website at JSON Schema, Nov 2024 - Jul 2025 · 9 mos, Remote, Managing the triage process of the website repository, reviewing PRs, and helping contributors.

Software Engineer Intern at takeUforward, Sep 2024 - May 2025 · 9 mos, India, - Built one of the most used features on the platform, a system that serializes and deserializes testcases for arrays, 2D arrays, strings, numbers, trees, and graphs, handling over 1.5 million submissions per month. - Created a system that shows exactly which testcase failed when code is submitted, including its input and output, making debugging much faster. - Contributed to the launch of TUF Version 2/3 and delivered many other features now used by thousands of people every day.

GSoC @JSON Schema Orgs at Google Summer of Code, May 2024 - Aug 2024 · 4 mos, India, - Enhanced the CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions for linting, formatting, broken link checks, unit tests, build processes, and UI tests. - Configured Cypress for UI testing and integrated Codecov for code coverage reporting. - Developed workflows for community operations, including stale issue and PR detection, unauthorized file detection, and notifications for failed actions. - Migrated Cloudflare native deployment to GitHub Actions deployement for PR preview from forked repository. - Implemented GitVote for automated voting processes. - Fixed bugs related to Algolia search and unauthorized file detection. - Tech Stack: GitHub Actions, Cypress, Codecov, Cloudflare, GitVote. https://summerofcode.withgoogle.com/programs/2024/projects/izshFtex

Open Source Contributor at JSON Schema, Feb 2024 - Nov 2024 · 10 mos

Education

Bachelor of Technology - BTech, Computer Science and Engineering with Specialization in (Data Science and Artificial Intelligence), Indian Institute of Information Technology Ranchi

Class 10, St. Joseph's Senior Secondary School Siswa Bazar, Maharajganj

Public links

github: https://github.com/aialok