Headline

Staff Software Engineer @ Cohesity | Ex-PhonePe | Distributed Systems | Linux Kernel & Systems Software | 22 Years of Building Things

About

Twenty-two years in, and I still get a quiet thrill when a distributed system holds steady under pressure. No war room. No escalation. Just the system doing exactly what it was designed to do. That feeling never gets old. My career has been a long, deliberate journey through the stack — from writing 4G/10G Linux network device drivers in the kernel, to building a PCI-compliant Payment Gateway from scratch, to architecting a scheduling engine that fired 60 million time-sensitive reminders daily for 150M users. The common thread across all of it: I like being in the code, close to the problem, where the real decisions get made. I'm a committed Individual Contributor — not by default, but by choice. I've found that the best leverage I have is staying technically deep while thinking architecturally wide. People management is a craft I respect enormously; it's just not mine. I recently joined Cohesity as a Staff Software Engineer, stepping into the data security and resilience space. After nearly a decade building payments infrastructure at PhonePe — where reliability wasn't a feature, it was the product — this felt like a natural evolution. Different domain, same obsession: systems that don't break when it matters most. Outside work, I write about distributed systems, engineering culture, and the occasional hard lesson at pradeepdalvi.com — usually through analogies involving the human body, because it turns out evolution solved most of our architecture problems first. If you're thinking about resilience engineering, distributed systems design, or just want to geek out about something low-level — I'm always up for that conversation.

Location

Pune City

AI stack

antigravity

opencode

Work experience

Staff Software Engineer at Cohesity, May 2026 - Present · 4 mos, Pune City, Maharashtra, India, IaaS - Infrastructure as a Service

Senior Software Engineer at PhonePe, Jun 2017 - Apr 2026 · 8 yrs 11 mos, Pune City, Maharashtra, India, Founding Engineer @ Pune Office Payments Infrastructure & Zero-to-One Launches * Founding Architect: Established the Pune hub as the first hire; built a PCI-compliant PG from scratch, scaling to 1M+ daily transactions via MariaDB, RabbitMQ, and Aerospike. * Ecosystem Expansion: Pioneered the first consumer-facing system outside the PhonePe app, extending payment capabilities to the broader offline mass transit ecosystem. * Smart Routing: Built a proprietary Success Rate (SR) engine using pattern-matching that achieved a 78% success rate, outperforming internal ML models. * Strategic Integrations: Led deep-level Cybersource (Visa) integration, driving a major bank’s success rate from below 50% to 70+%. Platform Scaling & Retention (Smaran - Reminders 2.0) * High-Throughput Systems: Architected a multi-tenant, HBase-backed scheduling engine for 150M DAUs, scaling to 60M daily time-sensitive reminders. * Revenue Centric: Drove 30% of category transactions; achieved a 175% increase in Water Tax and 100% boost in Gas/Postpaid/Electricity reminders powered transactions. * Product Turnaround: Resolved peak-hour stability issues to break an 11-month plateau, delivering consistent ~10% MoM growth. * Operational Efficiency: Engineered NAAM (Automated Accounting Sign-off), accelerating new category onboarding by two weeks. Reliability, Compliance & Transit * High Availability: Engineered the first Active-Active Multi-DC DR for Recharge/BillPay, ensuring 99.99% uptime for mission-critical streams. * Observability: Leveraged end-to-end system visibility to preempt outages ahead of automated monitoring during massive festive traffic spikes. * Regulatory & Transit: Spearheaded NCMC (One Nation, One Card) for Metro transit and managed rigorous PPI/RBI compliance.

Software Architect at Calsoft, Mar 2017 - Jun 2017 · 4 mos, Pune City, Maharashtra, India, Prototyping Monolith to Microservices migration

Software Engineer at DataTorrent, May 2015 - Jan 2017 · 1 yr 9 mos, Pune/Pimpri-Chinchwad Area, Project in Brief: Big Data – Real Time Streaming platform • Operator Development: Engineered custom Apache Apex operators for projection, filtering, and laggard management in a real-time streaming. • AWS Cloud Integration: Developed the integration suite for Amazon AWS, enabling seamless customer trials and cloud-native scaling. • Security Engineering: Secured distributed communication within the RTS platform through advanced SSL/Security protocol implementation.

Principal Software Engineer at ScaleArc, Jun 2014 - Apr 2015 · 11 mos, Pune City, Maharashtra, India, Project in Brief: High-Performance Database Load Balancer. • Core Tech: Kafka, Zookeeper, Python, CPU Isolation, Threading, Distributed Systems. • Performance: Redesigned thread distribution for a High-Performance DB Load Balancer to optimise CPU utilisation. • Distributed Ops: Implemented Kafka-based message queues for real-time data streaming and Zookeeper for cluster synchronisation. • Monitoring: Built an asynchronous Python Alerting Engine for complex event processing across multi-node environments.

Education

Bachelor of Engineering, Computer Engineering, Savitribai Phule Pune University