Arihant Sethia

Resume download

Engineering leader with over 10 years of experience developing stateful, real-time, business-critical platforms in both startups and large-scale environments. Skilled in distributed systems, multi-region architectures, and autonomous platform design using declarative intent. Demonstrated success building platforms from inception and evolving critical systems. Committed to operational reliability, streamlined architecture, and scalable, secure system primitives.

Experience #

CloudKitchens — Mountain View, CA #

Tech Lead Manager / Software Engineer Dec 2020 — Present

  • Drove cross-org platform evolution from store-centric to multi-entity integration modeling. New architecture enables business expansion across 3P logistics, enterprise APIs, and adjacent product verticals.
  • Designed sharded orchestration service with durable distributed cache and real-time invalidation for merchant and credential data. Eliminated critical-path dependencies behind multiple Sev-1 outages, improving order import reliability from 99.9% to 99.99%.
  • Led design of a merchant account platform managing over 1 million accounts with proactive session management and usage lifecycle. Unified the account model to eliminate recurring rate-limit and authentication issues.
  • Co-designed a sharded service for managing core merchant entities. Developed change feeds to support cache invalidation across the entity graph, enabling downstream services to build custom views independently.
  • Designed a websocket/mqtt-based streaming platform used by over 20,000 stores, reducing order discovery latency from 30 sec to 2 sec.
  • Designed and built the Integration DevKit, enabling external engineers to develop integrations. Defined the security model and artifact pipeline, and led the adoption of observability libraries across a 30+ engineer organization.
  • Rearchitected monolithic gateway into containerized bundles with automated deployments, reducing deploy time from days to under 2 hrs.
  • Led engineering effort improving store connectivity from 53% to 82%. Coordinated with Product and Operations to define KPIs, build monitoring mechanisms, and automate recovery workflows.
  • Set technical strategy and multi-quarter roadmap for the platform; defined core primitives, abstractions, and success metrics to align execution across teams. Participated in 200+ interviews, led hiring panels, and mentored Senior and Staff engineers on technical growth.

Amazon Web Services — Honeycode — Cupertino, CA #

Contributed to the successful public launch of AWS Honeycode.

Senior Software Engineer (L6) Jun 2020 — Dec 2020

  • Led the architectural redesign of workbook assets to enable sandboxed edits and draft-publish workflows for apps and automations.
  • Drove CloudTrail integration by isolating audit query processing from latency-critical workbook operations.

Software Engineer II Jul 2018 — Jun 2020

  • Optimized a memory-intensive (400GB+) service, increasing per-instance throughput from 500 to 1,800 TPS through scenario-based load testing, JVM profiling, heap analysis, and configuration optimization.
  • Achieved 1,400x data reduction by identifying less than 1% relevance in the analytics pipeline. Redesigned the system with explicit metrics and asynchronous logging, improving per-pod throughput by 1.8x.
  • Redesigned the load-testing setup to reduce state initialization time and bootstrap memory profile, allowing a 15x increase in test scale.
  • Co-designed a successive leader election mechanism to allow fast handoff during graceful shutdown with consistent journal replay.
  • Co-invented automatic application generation from user data and launched server-side deep copy to reliably manage large app hierarchies.
  • Implemented multi-user undo/redo for collaborative spreadsheets/workbooks.

Amazon — Identity Services — Bangalore, India #

Contributed to Amazon’s widely publicized, multi-year effort to migrate its consumer business off Oracle databases, as detailed in Migration Complete.

Software Engineer II Oct 2016 — Jun 2018

  • Built the Identity Change Data Stream (ICDS), a DynamoDB CDC framework that replaced Oracle materialized views. Adopted by over 40 engineers across multiple Tier-1 services, to enable real-time search and data warehouse ingestion.
  • Developed the Oracle to DynamoDB migration strategy and multiple components for data reconciliation and quality measurement. Used across Tier-1 services handling over 1 million QPS.
  • Established best practices for indexing, encryption, pre-provisioning, and write sharding. Built foundational libraries for encryption at rest and symbol-table-based serialization to optimize payloads. Led DynamoDB scaling and operational readiness for peak traffic events.
  • Partnered with the engineering manager to scale the team from 3 to 18. Developed interns and junior engineers through multiple levels and fostered a culture of ownership to raise technical standards.

Software Engineer Jul 2015 — Oct 2016

  • Led a zero-downtime migration of the Session Service from Oracle to DynamoDB, making it one of teams’ 1st Tier-1 systems on DynamoDB.
  • Extended a distributed rate-limiting library to over 600 host fleets by adding dynamic per-customer rules, auto-expiry, and real-time observability. The solution was adopted across multiple organizations and remained in production for over five years.
  • Built cross-region replication data validator for encrypted payloads on DynamoDB.

Education #

Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati — B.Tech, Computer Science & Engineering 2011 — 2015

Skills #

  • Languages: Java, Go (Golang), Python
  • System Design & Architecture: Distributed Systems, Microservices, Event-Driven Architectures, API Design, Data Modeling, Platform Engineering, High-Availability, Scalability, Resilience, Declarative & Intent-Based Design
  • Databases & Data Streaming: DynamoDB, CockroachDB, PostgreSQL, Oracle, Kinesis, Kafka, SQS, S3, Temporal
  • Cloud & Infrastructure: AWS (EC2, Lambda, SQS, etc.), Azure, GCP, Kubernetes (K8s), Istio
  • Tools & Frameworks: gRPC, Spring Boot, Gradle, Jenkins, Prometheus, Grafana, Git
  • Practices: CI/CD, Observability, Agile Methodologies, Technical Leadership, Mentorship, SDK Development, Secure Development Lifecycle

Patent & Awards #

  • Patent: U.S. Patent 11,663,199 (2023): Application Development Based on Stored Data
  • Awards: IIT-JEE (Top 0.3%, 2011) | AIEEE (Top 0.05%, 2011) | KVPY Scholar (2010)