01. about
An Engineer & Athlete
6+ years building distributed systems that handle millions of daily requests. I specialize in high-throughput microservices, event-driven architecture, and performance engineering at scale.
Currently at 7-Eleven leading backend infrastructure for the 7NOW food delivery platform. Previously built logistics systems at Amazon impacting hundreds of thousands of sellers across 8 countries. Now targeting Senior Software Engineer roles where I can lead architecture and mentor teams.
MS Computer Science
University of Texas at Dallas · 2021
Microsoft Applied Agentic AI
April 2026
Microsoft AI Engineer Program
August 2026
beyond the code
02. experience
Where I've Worked
03. skills
Technical Arsenal
core competencies
04. insights
Engineering Insights
Learning from systems built at massive scale
OpenAI
source ↗Scaling LLM Inference
key ideas
- ▸LLMs are served through distributed inference clusters
- ▸Requests are batched to maximize GPU utilization
- ▸Scheduling layers prioritize latency-sensitive workloads
- ▸Horizontal scaling handles traffic spikes
Stripe
source ↗Designing Idempotent APIs
key ideas
- ▸APIs must be safe to retry in distributed systems
- ▸Clients send an idempotency key with each request
- ▸The backend stores the request and response for that key
- ▸Retries return the cached response instead of re-executing
Netflix
source ↗Building Resilient Streaming Systems
key ideas
- ▸Microservices communicate through resilient service meshes
- ▸Circuit breakers prevent cascading failures
- ▸Chaos engineering validates system reliability
- ▸Services degrade gracefully instead of failing completely
Uber
source ↗Real-Time Dispatch Architecture
key ideas
- ▸Real-time location streams processed via distributed event pipelines
- ▸Kafka handles high-throughput event ingestion
- ▸Dispatch decisions rely on low-latency geospatial computations
- ▸Systems balance throughput with real-time responsiveness
Cloudflare
source ↗Edge Computing at Global Scale
key ideas
- ▸Edge networks run workloads close to the user
- ▸Global request routing improves latency and reliability
- ▸Stateless services allow horizontal scaling
- ▸Edge workers enable lightweight serverless compute
The Tail at Scale
key ideas
- ▸Slow requests at the tail significantly impact overall user experience
- ▸Even rare slow responses can delay an entire request chain
- ▸Request hedging and replication reduce tail latency
- ▸Optimize for worst-case latency, not just average
05. projects
Things I've Built
Kodai — Local-First AI Coding Agent
Open Source · 2025
A local-first AI coding agent built ground-up on hexagonal architecture — the core knows nothing about any host environment, model provider, or IDE, and communicates with the outside world through typed ports that adapters plug into. Currently available as a VS Code extension, with CLI and additional IDE support planned. Designed to run well on locally-hosted LLMs like Ollama and LM Studio alongside cloud providers, so a developer on a 16GB laptop gets a genuinely useful agent, not a degraded cloud fallback. Multi-model by design: different jobs route to different models — planning to Claude, edits to a fast local coder, embeddings to a tiny embedder. Never silently truncates context, every dangerous action goes through an explicit approval card, and the plugin architecture lets contributors ship new tools, providers, and retrievers without forking.
VS Code Extension — Function Call Tree Hover
Open Source · 2026
VS Code extension that displays an interactive call tree on hover, recursively showing all functions a given function calls up to a configurable depth. Supports JavaScript, TypeScript, and JSX/TSX via the VS Code Call Hierarchy API.
Code Understanding Agent
Open Source · 2026
AI-powered CLI and web app that indexes any public GitHub repository and answers natural language questions about the codebase. Uses a multi-strategy retrieval pipeline (semantic search, BM25, graph traversal, RRF reranking) and an agentic reasoning loop with tool-calling to trace logic across files — returning cited, business-level explanations with exact file:line references.
QSR Integration Platform
7-Eleven · 2024
Rearchitected Cart, Checkout, and Order microservices to onboard Quick Service Restaurant chains, unlocking a 10% revenue increase.
Split Payment System
7-Eleven · 2023
SNAP EBT + Cashback + Card split-payment architecture enabling government benefit spending. Doubled average basket size from $30 to $60.
VS Code Extension — JSON Pro
Open Source · 2026
VS Code extension providing a complete JSON toolbox: formatter, minifier, auto-fixer, diff checker, JSONPath query, stats dashboard, TypeScript interface generator, YAML converter, deep merge, flatten/unflatten, search, sidebar tree view, hover intelligence for Base64/timestamps/dates, and real-time diagnostics with duplicate key detection.
06. contact
Let's Build Something
Open to senior SWE roles and interesting distributed systems challenges. Reach out directly or send a message.
akshaykbkale@gmail.com
linkedin.com/in/akshaykbkale