Hi, I'm Saurabh Sharma
Associate Principal / Staff Backend Engineer Open-Source Gem Author & Distributed Systems
With 15+ years of software engineering leadership, I architect, scale, and optimize fault-tolerant distributed systems and mission-critical SaaS platforms. Creator of active_record-undo, a published open-source Ruby gem providing transactional cascading soft-deletes and atomic restores. Proven track record of slashing enterprise AWS infrastructure spend, modernizing zero-downtime authentication architectures for millions of global users, and instituting engineering governance across multi-regional teams at Monster, CareerBuilder, 4moles, and Yatra.
Saurabh Sharma
New Delhi, India
About & Architecture
High-Performance System Architecture with Proven SaaS Impact
Over the past 15 years, I've led technical strategy and hands-on implementation across mission-critical enterprise platforms like Monster.com, CareerBuilder, 4moles, and Yatra.com. Here are the core pillars of my engineering approach:
Distributed Systems & Microservices
Architecting unified microservices frameworks across Rails, React, and Java for AI job marketplaces, boosting fault tolerance, decoupling services, and reducing API latency across international zones.
Auth & Identity (SSO/OAuth)
Modernizing core authentication for Monster.com with zero-downtime secret rotations, resilient session management, and enterprise Admin Panels for OAuth 2.0 / Client Credentials and dynamic claims.
Cloud Cost & Pipeline Engineering
Cutting AWS spend by ~35% (halving DynamoDB costs from $5.5K to $2.6K/mo, optimizing SQS) for 270M+ monthly job alert dispatches via audience recency tiering; zero-downtime blue-green deployments.
High-Throughput Performance
Sustaining 99.99% availability on ecommerce checkouts, slashing TTFB from 4s to 0.7s, TTI from 12s to 3s, and real-time booking latency from ~30s to ~10s via Redis slot-locking.
active_record-undo
A transactional, cascade-aware soft deletion and atomic restoration library for Ruby on Rails. Unlike
timestamp-only gems that cause zombie resurrections, it captures a native polymorphic audit snapshot
(UndoLog) across dependent relations in a single
atomic database transaction.
Technical Stack
Comprehensive Skills Matrix
A production-hardened toolkit built over 15+ years of scaling web applications, microservices, and cloud infrastructure.
Languages & Core
Core languages & frameworks
Cloud & Systems
Distributed cloud architecture
Databases & Messaging
Data persistence & queues
DevOps & CI/CD
Pipelines & automation
Architecture & APIs
Design principles & systems
Leadership & Standards
Team governance & quality
Track Record
Professional Work Experience
A chronological timeline of engineering leadership and high-scale contributions.
Associate Principal Engineer
- Cloud Cost & Pipeline Optimization: Spearheaded pipeline optimization for high-volume job alert dispatches (270M+ emails/month) via audience recency tiering, cutting AWS spend by ~35% (halving DynamoDB costs from $5.5K to $2.6K/mo, optimizing SQS) while reducing downstream search API load.
- Distributed Identity Architecture: Modernized core authentication ecosystem for Monster.com, ensuring high availability, zero-downtime secret rotations, and resilient session management.
- Enterprise SSO Infrastructure: Designed and delivered a secure enterprise Admin Panel for Single Sign-On client management, enabling OAuth 2.0 / Client Credentials flows and dynamic claim mapping.
- Microservices Framework: Led architectural decomposition of the AI job marketplace into a unified Rails and React microservices framework, boosting fault tolerance and reducing API latency.
- Engineering Governance: Institutionalized standardized automated testing frameworks and OpenAPI/Swagger guardrails, maintaining a 95%+ RSpec baseline coverage across services.
Senior Software Engineer (Staff Scope)
- High-Throughput E-Commerce: Scaled distributed backend checkout services for a global ecommerce platform, sustaining 99.99% availability during peak traffic spikes.
- Asynchronous Message Processing: Engineered decoupled background queue architectures with Redis and AWS SQS, eliminating transactional order bottlenecks.
- CI/CD Modernization: Automated deployment pipelines via Jenkins, Docker, and AWS ECS, slashing release cycle times by >40% with zero-downtime blue-green deployments.
- Test Engineering: Maintained a 95% RSpec coverage baseline across payment gateways and mission-critical customer APIs.
- Technical Mentorship: Mentored engineers, authored Architecture Decision Records (ADRs), and led organizational system design reviews.
Engineering Lead
- Team Leadership: Led 4 engineers across web and mobile platforms to deliver on core business KPIs.
- Performance Engineering: Reduced TTFB from 4s to 0.7s and TTI from 12s to 3s through asset pipelining and query caching.
- Real-Time Systems: Architected real-time booking engine with Redis and ActionCable, dropping flow latency from ~30s to ~10s with distributed slot-locking.
- Edge Security & Deployments: Automated DigitalOcean deployments via Capistrano and secured edge traffic via Cloudflare WAF & CDN.
Senior Engineer
- High-Volume Transaction Backends: Engineered core high-throughput transaction backends and multi-provider aggregation services using Java and PHP.
- Database Schema Optimization: Optimized relational schemas and complex queries for sub-second responses on high-volume travel search engines.
Software Engineer
- Multitenant Database Architecture: Engineered multitenant database architectures on Rails, tuning query indexing for vertical scale at QBox.com.
- Enterprise Web Platforms: Delivered client-facing enterprise web applications across modern PHP frameworks, WordPress, and Magento.
Portfolio & Open Source
Featured Engineering Projects
Selected systems, open-source gems, and architectural frameworks engineered for production scale.
active_record-undo
Event-driven, transactional, cascade-aware soft deletion and atomic restores for Ruby on Rails.
Traditional soft deletion gems rely solely on timestamps (e.g. deleted_at), which
inevitably creates catastrophic "zombie" resurrections when restoring parents with historically
deleted children. active_record-undo fixes this fundamental flaw
by recording a native polymorphic audit snapshot (UndoLog and UndoLogItem) in an
atomic database transaction at deletion time.
has_many & has_one traversal
Current.user & multi-tenant context
PurgeJob background workers
gem "active_record-undo"
Global SSO & Admin Management Platform
Architected high-availability authentication system and enterprise Admin Panel handling OAuth2 Client Credentials, zero-downtime secret rotations, and token metadata claims for global traffic zones.
Global Checkout & Hiring Platform
Scaled distributed backend checkout services for an enterprise hiring and ecommerce platform, sustaining 99.99% availability. Decoupled asynchronous order processing with Redis and AWS SQS to eliminate transactional bottlenecks.
Real-Time Golf Booking & Concurrency Engine
Engineered real-time slot-locking using Redis and Action Cable (WebSockets). Reduced booking flow latency from 30s to 10s and slashed page TTFB from 4s down to 0.7s with Cloudflare WAF/CDN.
Multitenant SaaS & Database Architecture
Architected high-scale multitenancy models on Ruby on Rails, designing isolated tenant boundaries, indexed schema partitioning, and query optimization for high concurrency.
Academic Foundation
Education & Qualifications
Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech) in Computer Science
Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University (GGSIPU)
New Delhi, India • Core emphasis on Distributed Systems, Algorithms, Data Structures, and Software Engineering.
Let's Build Resilient Systems Together.
Whether you're looking for an experienced technical leader to spearhead distributed systems, need architectural consulting, or want to discuss Ruby gems and system design — I'd love to connect.