Headline

Lead Engineer @ Sanas

About

Backend & Platform Engineer with 7+ years of experience building and scaling distributed systems at product-led startups. I currently work on the backend platform powering all Sanas products — designed and built billing, subscriptions, usage metering, feature entitlement, reporting, and payment gateway integration, and also accountable for availability, reliability, security, latency, and cost across 10+ microservices serving 300K users. My core stack includes Go, Kubernetes, Kafka, ClickHouse, PostgreSQL, Redis, and AWS. I'm especially interested in the internals of distributed systems and system design trade-offs. Alongside production work, I've studied foundational systems such as Kafka, Dynamo, Raft, and Google Spanner; published technical write-ups on Medium; and built simplified implementations of Kafka, ClickHouse, and etcd, available on GitHub. Selected impact: * Raised platform availability from ~90% to 99.9% while scaling from 10K to 300K users — owned the reliability roadmap: architecture reviews, failure-mode analysis, and capacity planning across all services * Owned the revenue-path backend platform used by all Sanas products: billing, subscriptions, usage metering, feature entitlement, reporting, and payment gateway integration * Designed and operated the company-wide identity platform (self-hosted Ory), providing authentication and authorization for every Sanas product * Cut MTTR from ~4 hours to under 30 minutes by building full-stack observability across the backend platform (New Relic + CloudWatch) and establishing the alerting and on-call practices around it * Designed and operated self-hosted observability infrastructure (Sentry + Grafana) for desktop app monitoring and error tracking * Reduced infrastructure costs by ~$20K/month by consolidating AWS environments, eliminating a duplicate Azure dependency, and optimizing ClickHouse * Led a team of four engineers to rebuild the reporting platform on Go, Kafka, ClickHouse, and React * Moved release engineering from biweekly deployments to daily, zero-downtime releases; cut developer onboarding from three weeks to one day

Location

Bengaluru

AI stack

claude code

claude

codex

ChatGPT

Work experience

Lead Engineer at Sanas, Nov 2024 - Present · 1 y 10 mo, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Built scalable distributed systems

Software Development Engineer - II at Whatfix, Jan 2022 - Nov 2024 · 2 y 10 mo, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Worked on complex desktop application, built installer and auto update

Senior Software Engineer at In Time Tec, Jul 2019 - Dec 2021 · 2 y 5 mo, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Learnt to build backend applications

Education

Bachelor of Engineering, Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering, The National Institute Of Engineering, Mysore

Diploma of Education, Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering, Government Polytechnic, Tumakuru

Public links

github: https://github.com/harshithgowdakt

medium: https://medium.com/@harshithgowdakt

leetcode: https://leetcode.com/harshithgowda_kt