Ryan Patel

Senior Software Engineer
๐Ÿ“ San Francisco, CA ๐Ÿ• Available for hire
I build distributed systems and developer tooling. Currently focused on real-time infrastructure, observability, and making databases do things they weren't designed for. Previously worked on low-latency trading systems and cloud-native platforms.

Experience

Jan 2023 โ€” Present

Senior Software Engineer

Orbital Systems Inc. ยท Remote

Lead the design of a real-time streaming ingestion pipeline handling 2M+ events/sec using Kafka and Flink. Built an internal feature flagging and experimentation platform serving 200+ microservices. Reduced p99 latency by 60% through connection pooling and batching optimizations.

Mar 2020 โ€” Dec 2022

Software Engineer II

QuantEdge Technologies ยท New York, NY

Developed low-latency market data feed handlers in Rust and Go, achieving sub-microsecond processing. Owned the firm's internal gRPC gateway serving 50+ trading strategies. Migrated legacy monolith to event-driven architecture on Kubernetes, cutting deployment time from 45 min to 4 min.

Jun 2018 โ€” Feb 2020

Software Engineer

Nebula Cloud ยท San Francisco, CA

Built multi-tenant API gateway handling auth, rate limiting, and request routing for the company's PaaS product. Designed and implemented a distributed tracing SDK adopted by 40+ internal teams. Contributed to the open-source Envoy proxy project.

Projects

2025

K9s โ€” Kubernetes Terminal UI

Contributed multi-cluster context switching and resource filtering to this popular open-source k8s TUI tool. Implemented a plugin system that lets users extend the UI with custom commands.

GoBubble TeaKubernetes
2024

Tailpipe โ€” Real-time Log Aggregator

A lightweight log streaming agent that tailors log lines from multiple containers and ships them to S3-compatible storage with sub-second latency. Designed for edge deployments where Promtail is overkill.

RustTokioArrow
2023

Crosshairs โ€” Packet-level Proxy Debugger

A debugging proxy that captures, inspects, and rewrites HTTP/2 and WebSocket traffic in real-time. Used by the team to diagnose protocol-level issues during the migration from REST to gRPC.

GoHTTP/2Wireshark

Blog

May 15, 2026 How we cut Kafka lag by 80% with a single config change Mar 2, 2026 Why I stopped using WebSocket for proxying (and what I use now) Dec 8, 2025 Building a distributed tracing SDK from scratch โ€” lessons learned Sep 20, 2025 Low-latency garbage collection: tuning JVM for sub-millisecond trading Jun 11, 2025 My Go-to-Rust migration checklist for high-throughput services

Contact

Feel free to reach out if you want to collaborate, talk infrastructure, or just say hi.