Daksham/ Eng.
Available for select engagements · Remote — IST

Daksham —
building quietly ambitious
software since 2018.

Full-stack engineer with seven years across early-stage products and enterprise platforms. I write clear code, ship measured releases, and care a little too much about typography.

Get in touch See selected work Download résumé (PDF)
Years shipping
07
Roles held
04
Open-source projects
12
Time zone
UTC +05:30
01 — About
Hello — I'm Daksham.

A short introduction.

I'm a full-stack software engineer based in India, with seven years of professional practice. I've worked across early-stage startups and enterprise platforms — building products that need to feel light, but hold weight underneath.

My happy place is the seam between a clean React front-end and a well-modelled Postgres schema. I write Go and TypeScript daily, read more documentation than I probably should, and prefer boring tools applied to interesting problems.

Outside of the code editor I bind notebooks, ride long brevets, and drink too much V60. I'm currently happiest when I'm leading a small, senior team on a hard product — and I'm slowly writing essays about the craft.

02 — Experience
Where I've spent my hours.

Seven years, four chapters.

● 2023 — Present
Remote

Senior Full Stack Engineer · now

at Northwind Systems

Lead engineer on the platform team, owning architecture for a multi-tenant SaaS serving 40k+ daily users.

  • Migrated the legacy monolith to a modular service mesh; cut p95 latency from 920ms to 180ms.
  • Designed an event-driven billing pipeline (Kafka + Postgres + Stripe) processing $2.1M/mo.
  • Mentored a team of 6 engineers; introduced design reviews, RFC culture and CI quality gates.
  • Shipped the company's first public API; grew partner integrations 4× in two quarters.
TypeScriptNode.jsReactPostgresKafkaAWSTerraform
2021 — 2023
Bengaluru

Full Stack Engineer

at Helix Labs

Built data-heavy internal tools for an analytics product used by enterprise data teams.

  • Owned the dashboard builder end-to-end — drag-and-drop canvas, query layer, sharing model.
  • Rewrote the front-end with React + Suspense; brought TTI from 6.4s to 1.8s on cold cache.
  • Authored a query caching layer in Go that saved $48k/yr in warehouse compute.
ReactGoClickHouseRedisGraphQL
2019 — 2021
Pune

Software Engineer

at Argo Retail

Joined as the third engineer; helped scale a B2B commerce platform from pilot to series A.

  • Built the catalog and order-fulfilment services from scratch in Django + Postgres.
  • Set up the company's first CI/CD pipeline and observability stack (Sentry, Grafana, Loki).
  • Wrote the playbook for on-call rotations and incident reviews.
PythonDjangoPostgresVueDocker
2018 — 2019
Pune

Junior Developer

at Citrus Software

First job out of college — learned the craft on a small but generous team.

  • Shipped customer-facing features for a school management SaaS used by 200+ institutions.
  • Wrote my first 10,000 lines of production code. Broke prod twice. Learned a lot.
PHPLaravelMySQLjQuery
03 — Selected Work
A small, edited cross-section.

Things I've built.

6 shown · 6 total
2025 · Solo buildLive

Ledger.fyi

A plain-text accounting app for solo founders. Markdown in, balance sheet out.

SvelteKitRustSQLite
Case study
2024 · Co-founder, engLive

Tableaux

Interactive data tables for journalists — sortable, joinable, embeddable. No spreadsheet skills required.

ReactDuckDB-WASM
Case study
2024 · Solo buildv0.4

kettle

Tiny job runner for hobby servers. Drop-in replacement for cron with a real UI and retries.

Go
Case study
2023 · Design + engTestFlight

Folio Reader

A read-it-later app obsessed with typography. Imports from Pocket, Instapaper, RSS.

SwiftCloudKit
Case study
2023 · Solo buildv1.2

Stoa

A Markdown-first wiki for tiny teams. Two text files, four endpoints, no database.

GoHTMX
Case study
2022 — now · WritingOngoing

Field Notes

An ongoing essay series on the craft of building software — published roughly monthly.

—
Case study
04 — Ideas
Convictions, lightly held.

Things I believe about software.

I.

Boring tools, bold problems.

Most of my best work uses Postgres, a queue and a careful schema. Save your novelty budget for the product.

II.

Latency is a feature.

A 200ms page that always loads beats a 60ms page that occasionally doesn't. Reliability compounds.

III.

Write the README first.

If you can't explain what a service does in a paragraph, you don't understand it yet — and neither will the next engineer.

IV.

Design lives in the diff.

Polish is not a final pass. It's a thousand tiny decisions made one PR at a time.

V.

Pair the calendar with the code.

Every meeting I keep is a feature I won't ship. Defaults matter; protect the maker's schedule fiercely.

05 — Intro
If you'd rather hear it from me.

A two-minute hello.

Intro · 02:14 · Recorded May 2026

What you'll get out of this.

A short walk-through of how I think about my work, the kind of teams I do my best work with, and what I'd love to build next.

Duration
02:14
Recorded
May 2026
Best on
Headphones, full screen
Transcript
Available
06 — Certificates
Things I had to study for.

Paperwork, mostly well-earned.

01
AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate
Amazon Web Services
AWS-CSA-23901
2024
02
Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
CNCF
CKA-21008
2023
03
HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate
HashiCorp
TA-39847
2023
04
MongoDB Certified Developer
MongoDB University
MDB-DEV-1492
2022
05
Meta Front-End Developer Professional
Meta / Coursera
META-FE-7720
2021
07 — Writing
Essays on the craft.

A few field notes.

Full archive at read.daksham.dev

Apr 20268 min read

On editing code like prose

The best engineers I've worked with treat every line like a sentence. They cut. They re-arrange. They listen for rhythm.

Read essay →
Feb 202612 min read

What a senior engineer actually does

It is not, mostly, writing more code. It is making other people's code easier to write — and easier to delete.

Read essay →
Nov 20256 min read

A small case against microservices

Most teams shipping microservices needed three things: a job queue, a feature flag, and a long weekend with the monolith.

Read essay →
Sep 202510 min read

Notes from seven years of on-call

Every incident I've been part of falls into one of four buckets. Here's the taxonomy and what to do about each.

Read essay →
08 — Outside Work
Hobbies, in earnest.

What I do when I'm not coding.

01
Bookbinding

I make my own notebooks. Coptic stitch, Tomoe River paper.

02
Endurance cycling

Trying to ride a brevet a quarter. Last: 200km, June '25.

03
Specialty coffee

V60, lately. Beans from the Western Ghats when I can find them.

04
Chess

1640 rapid. Mediocre but stubborn — like all my hobbies.

05
Photography

35mm film, mostly Portra. Family weddings are my training ground.

06
Mechanical keyboards

Topre. The argument is over.

09 — Contact
The simplest section to design.

Let's talk.

I'm currently considering a small number of new engagements for the second half of 2026 — staff/lead roles, advisory, and the occasional product build. The fastest way to reach me is email; I reply within 48 hours on weekdays.