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Kalsoom Asif
Available for Senior & Staff roles

Kalsoom Asif

Senior Software Engineer · Distributed Systems & Platform Engineering

I design and run the high-scale systems other teams build on — event pipelines, developer platforms, and the reliability practices that keep them fast and available.

View Experience Contact Resume

Remote · Open to Relocation

events / day in production
12M+events / day in production
platform availability
99.99%platform availability
p99 latency
−47%p99 latency
teams on my platforms
40+teams on my platforms

01 / ABOUT

Engineering depth, business judgment.

I'm a senior engineer focused on distributed systems and platform engineering. For the past several years I've owned infrastructure that sits on the critical path — multi-region event ingestion, real-time data pipelines, and self-service platforms used by dozens of internal teams and external partners.

My work sits where architecture meets operations: I care as much about SLOs, error budgets, and on-call health as I do about throughput and latency. I've led migrations from legacy batch systems to event-driven architectures, cut time-to-production from weeks to days, and helped teams adopt real service ownership.

I also bring an unusual combination of credentials — a B.S. in Computer Science, an MBA, and a Doctor of Business Administration. In practice that means technical depth paired with product and business judgment, and the research discipline to make decisions from evidence rather than intuition.

  • Technical depth

    B.S. Computer Science — distributed systems, streaming, and production infrastructure at scale.

  • Business judgment

    MBA — framing engineering trade-offs in terms of cost, risk, and product outcomes.

  • Research rigor

    DBA — structured, evidence-based decision making applied to architecture and org design.

02 / EXPERIENCE

Experience

Five years building and operating production infrastructure — the last four at senior level, owning systems on the critical path.

  1. Mar 2024 — Present

    Remote

    Senior Software Engineer · AetherScale Systems

    • Lead design and development of a multi-region event ingestion and processing platform handling 12M+ events per day with 99.99% availability.
    • Reduced p99 end-to-end latency by 47% through architectural redesign of the streaming pipeline, introduction of tiered caching, and query path optimizations.
    • Drove adoption of a service ownership model across three teams; established SLOs, error budgets, and on-call practices that cut mean time to recovery by 35%.
    • Mentored four engineers on system design, production readiness, and incident response; contributed to hiring and leveling discussions.
    • Go
    • TypeScript
    • Kubernetes
    • Kafka
    • PostgreSQL
    • Redis
    • AWS (EKS, MSK, S3)
    • Terraform
    • OpenTelemetry

  2. Jul 2022 — Feb 2024

    Remote

    Senior Software Engineer · HelixPath Technologies

    • Owned core platform services powering real-time data pipelines used by 40+ internal teams and external partners.
    • Designed and shipped a self-service developer platform that reduced average time-to-production for new services from 3 weeks to under 4 days.
    • Led migration of legacy monolithic batch jobs to a cloud-native, event-driven architecture, improving throughput by 3.2× and lowering infrastructure cost by 28%.
    • Collaborated with product and data science teams to define contracts and SLAs for high-priority data products.
    • Go
    • Python
    • Kubernetes
    • gRPC
    • Apache Pulsar
    • Cassandra
    • AWS
    • Prometheus
    • Grafana

  3. Jun 2021 — Jun 2022

    Remote

    Software Engineer · NexaForge Technologies

    • Developed and maintained microservices and REST/gRPC APIs supporting customer-facing product features at scale.
    • Implemented automated testing, CI/CD pipelines, and observability instrumentation that improved deployment frequency and reduced production incidents.
    • Participated in on-call rotation and post-incident reviews; contributed to runbooks and reliability improvements.
    • TypeScript
    • Node.js
    • Go
    • PostgreSQL
    • Redis
    • Docker
    • AWS (ECS, RDS, SQS)

03 / PROJECTS

Selected impact

Three systems that shaped how the organizations around them ship, scale, and recover.

AetherScale Systems

Multi-Region Event Ingestion Platform

A globally distributed ingestion and processing layer that every downstream product depends on.

Problem

A single-region streaming pipeline with tail-latency spikes under load and no clear failure-domain isolation.

Approach

  • Re-architected ingestion into regional Kafka (MSK) clusters with idempotent producers and cross-region replication
  • Introduced tiered caching (in-process → Redis) and rewrote hot query paths against PostgreSQL
  • Instrumented end-to-end with OpenTelemetry; tied alerts to SLO burn rates instead of raw thresholds
  • Go
  • Kafka
  • Kubernetes
  • Redis
  • PostgreSQL
  • OpenTelemetry
events / day
12M+
availability
99.99%
p99 latency
−47%

HelixPath Technologies

Self-Service Developer Platform

A golden-path platform that takes a new service from idea to production without a ticket queue.

Problem

Launching a service required weeks of hand-offs across infra, security, and observability teams.

Approach

  • Opinionated service templates with CI/CD, gRPC scaffolding, and dashboards provisioned on creation
  • Policy-as-code guardrails so teams move fast without bypassing security or reliability standards
  • Built-in Prometheus/Grafana instrumentation so every service is observable from day one
  • Go
  • Kubernetes
  • gRPC
  • Terraform
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
time to production
3 wks → <4 days
teams onboarded
40+
observability
Day 1

HelixPath → AetherScale

Batch-to-Streaming Migration & Reliability Program

Retired legacy batch infrastructure and replaced heroics with service ownership, SLOs, and error budgets.

Problem

Monolithic nightly batch jobs were slow, expensive, and fragile — and incidents had no clear owners.

Approach

  • Decomposed batch jobs into event-driven consumers on Apache Pulsar with replayable, partitioned streams
  • Incremental strangler-fig cutover with dual-writes and reconciliation to guarantee correctness
  • Rolled out SLOs, error budgets, and structured on-call across three teams with blameless post-incident reviews
  • Apache Pulsar
  • Cassandra
  • Python
  • Go
  • AWS
throughput
3.2×
infra cost
−28%
MTTR
−35%

04 / SKILLS

Skills

Languages
  • Go
  • TypeScript
  • Python
  • SQL
Systems & Infrastructure
  • Kubernetes
  • Docker
  • Kafka
  • gRPC
  • Microservices
  • Distributed Systems
  • Event-Driven Architecture
Cloud & Observability
  • AWS (EKS, MSK, S3, RDS, SQS)
  • Terraform
  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • OpenTelemetry
Data Stores
  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
  • Cassandra
Practices
  • System Design
  • SLOs & Error Budgets
  • CI/CD
  • Technical Mentorship
  • Incident Response

05 / EDUCATION

Education

  • Doctor of Business Administration (DBA)

    Capella University

  • Master of Business Administration (MBA)

    Capella University

  • Bachelor of Science in Computer Science

    Capella University

06 / CONTACT

Let's talk.

Open to Senior and Staff engineering roles on distributed systems, infrastructure, and platform teams. Remote or relocation.

Email

kalsoomsocials@gmail.com
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