👋 I’m Rahul R.

Hi, I’m a developer/SRE who ships secure, reliable software at scale. I like the mix of product + platform: designing flows, hardening auth, instrumenting metrics, and keeping systems calm in production. I try to tackle problems with the right tools and minimal overhead. I believe in problem-first, tool-agnostic approach.

Professionally I have 8+ years of experience of working with large-scale identity systems, cloud and onprem infrastructure, observability tooling, and security-driven product development.

Professional Career

Software Development

I was part of the Identity team at Yahoo, powering user authentication for millions of daily active users.

  • Designed, developed, and rolled out authentication flows: authenticator apps, push-based second factor, recovery codes, and OTP through Messenger
  • Mobile SDK work for a brief period, implemented OAuth 2.0 Dynamic Client Registration (RFC 7591)
  • Deputy Security PoC for the team
  • Drove threat modeling and software composition analysis initiatives with the Security team (The Paranoids)

Infrastructure

  • Built a resilience testing tool simulating DNS, network, and host failures to assess the production readiness of NoSQL systems
  • Built and operated Splunk clusters and dashboards
  • Set up abuse protection on a reverse proxy (Apache Traffic Server)
  • Set up alerts and dashboards across cloud and on-prem environments, covering system metrics, app metrics, and user probe metrics (external to the system)
  • Performed OS and BIOS upgrades on thousands of bare-metal servers using Chef and Ansible

Oncall

Took on weekly oncall duties (12 x 7). I wrote a guide on best practices for beginners.

  • Started taking this duty within the first month of my career
  • Have experience prioritizing what actually matters during a production outage
  • Performed outage postmortems and drove action items
  • Have numerous interesting war room stories we can chat about :)

Personal Projects

  • FlightOverMe: I was always curious whenever I saw a flight over me, so I built this to figure out which flight is flying over me at the moment.
  • Reading Room: I didn’t like how my Goodreads profile looked, so I built a 3D room to showcase the books I am reading or have read.
  • Phones: I was deep in a rabbit hole researching which phone to buy next, which brought back memories of all the times I had done this before. So I built this showroom, which shows all the phones I have owned so far, from a basic feature phone to the modern smartphone I use now.

Personal AI Stack

  • I have gone from using GitHub Copilot in 2024 to using Cursor and Claude Code nowadays.
    • I have attended 4 Cursor Cafe meetups and a Cursor build hackathon, which got me Cursor credits for my experiments.
  • I am currently reading AI Engineering by Chip Huyen to improve my fundamentals. Next up on my reading list is Inference Engineering by Philip Kiely.
  • How I usually work with AI on projects:
    1. Iterate on a Product Requirements Document covering all functionality, tech stack, edge cases, and test cases
    2. Come up with a design system for the project
    3. Divide the project into phases depending on its complexity
    4. Work with AI tools to build the project
    5. Show the product to people I meet in person or virtually. I also like to post on X and sometimes on my blog.
  • I recently started maintaining a public worklog of things I am working on at the moment.

Talks

I avoided public speaking in my childhood, which I regret now, but after my career started I began speaking more in public setting. Listed below are some of the talks I have delivered.

External

  • Resilience Testing Tool: LSPE (Large Scale Production Engineering) Meetup, 35th Edition, Dec 2020. (Video)
  • Hackathon @ SEABW (South East Asia Blockchain Week) Bangkok, May 2026: Was part of the top 10 teams, where I had to present my project on short notice in front of a panel of judges.
  • Labels we give ourselves, and outgrowing them: A 10-minute talk on how I outgrew labels earlier in my career, and how it is even easier now with the help of AI. The talk ended with a challenge to build something outside of their domain, and I offered my help taking the first step.

Internal to Workplace

  • Delivered multiple presentations about work projects
  • Presented proposed plans for major changes to architects, senior leadership, and fellow engineers for review and feedback
  • Delivered training sessions to new joiners

Meetups

  • I have attended multiple editions of the quarterly LSPE (Large Scale Production Engineering) Meetups held in Bengaluru.
  • After the recent AI advancements, I have started meeting a lot more people in person through events on Luma. It has been great talking to more diverse groups nowadays, not limited to people purely in the tech field.

Working Style

  • I like to plan my work in small, measurable milestones and do things in phases.
  • I like to think through and test on how software systems will react when some dependency or infra fails and I work on making it more resilient. Best way for this is to keep things as simple as possible
  • I am a big advocate of documenting decisions taken (tech or non-tech), learnings, postmortems of outages, and retro items, and of maintaining a company brain:
    • So future coworkers can easily onboard, even if the decision makers have left
    • It provides context during outages, even if the original feature owner is unavailable or has left the company
    • It makes migration decisions easier when the original assumptions are no longer valid
  • I like to keep a worklog of my activities so I can easily track where my time goes, and it makes performance review easier.
  • I am a strong believer in Paul Graham’s Maker’s Schedule, Manager’s Schedule. I prefer to balance the frequency of meetings, keeping in mind both productivity and the human need for connection.
  • I like to mentor junior employees and new joiners so they come up to speed quickly. I feel immense joy when they go on to do great things.