# Nikhil Vaidyar

> Senior Platform Engineer based in Bengaluru, India, with 6+ years building and running distributed systems in Go on Kubernetes and AWS. Kubernetes and Argo CD contributor. Open to platform, SRE and infrastructure roles in the Netherlands, Ireland or Germany (needs visa sponsorship; eligible for EU Blue Card, Dutch highly skilled migrant permit, Irish Critical Skills permit).

## Current roles
- Senior Software Engineer, Platform, Victoria's Secret & Co, Bengaluru (Mar 2025 – present). Owns delivery, streaming, caching and observability for peak e-commerce traffic on EKS: 8 clusters, 120+ nodes, 2,000+ pods.
- Software Engineer, AI Tutor, xAI, remote (May 2026 – present). Curates, validates and corrects AI-generated code for model training.

## Key results
- Flash-sale platform in Go on EKS: 20K+ requests/sec, 1,200+ orders/min, overselling cut from 1–2% to effectively zero.
- Kafka precompute pipeline (25K msgs/sec) ended cache stampedes; peak read p99 850 ms → 220 ms.
- AI-assisted SRE platform (Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, Loki, LLM agent with RAG): MTTR ~35 → ~10 minutes.
- Migrated 120+ microservices to GitOps (Harness, Argo CD): deploys 8 → 25 per week.
- Cut EKS compute spend 30% (~$18K/month) with Karpenter spot and right-sizing.
- Biofourmis (2020–2023): telemetry ingestion in Go, Kafka and Lambda for 100K+ patients, 400B+ data points/day.

## Open source (merged)
- Kubernetes: added net.ipv4.tcp_rmem and tcp_wmem to the kubelet safe sysctls (ships in v1.32): https://github.com/kubernetes/kubernetes/pull/127489
- Argo CD: OIDC domain_hint (#18214) and CLI extended-output hint (#18253), both in v2.12.
- kubernetes-sigs/cloud-provider-azure: registry.k8s.io migration (#3324).

## Skills
Go, Python, Java; Kubernetes (CKAD), EKS, Helm, Argo CD, KEDA, Karpenter; AWS, Terraform; Kafka, Redis, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB; Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry, SLOs; LLM agents, RAG, MCP.

## Education and certifications
B.Tech, Electronics and Communication Engineering, Rajasthan Technical University (2015–2019). Scaler CS program (2023). CKAD; Harness Certified CD & GitOps Developer.

## Links
- Website: https://nikzayn.github.io/
- GitHub: https://github.com/nikzayn
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/nikhil-vaidyar-2ab005124/
- Writing: https://nikhilvaidyar.medium.com
- Resume (PDF): https://nikzayn.github.io/assets/Nikhil_Vaidyar_Resume.pdf
- Email: nikhilvaidyar1997@gmail.com