Cover Letter

Dear Team,

I'm writing to express my interest in a role on your engineering team. As a software engineer currently at Coinbase — where I'm expanding regulated crypto derivatives trading to the UK and EU and building LLM-powered platforms that have cut support costs by millions annually — I bring a blend of large-scale systems experience, applied AI skills, and first-principles engineering depth.

My career has been shaped around systems that operate under real constraints. At D.E. Shaw & Co., I built time-series infrastructure serving 13M+ financial instruments and integrated RAG-based semantic search into quant workflows. At Rubrik, I scaled cloud backup from 8TB to 32TB and designed multi-cloud reporting frameworks adopted across all engineering teams. These roles taught me to think in correctness guarantees, latency budgets, and failure modes — not just feature delivery.

What sets me apart is a habit of building well below the abstraction layer I work on. I've written a transactional database engine from scratch (LSM Trees, MVCC, WAL — 10K+ TPS), a 32-bit x86 operating system in C and assembly, a real-time Raft consensus visualizer, a CRDT-based collaborative editor, and a 6-agent SRE swarm over NATS JetStream that autonomously detects and remediates infrastructure incidents. These aren't side curiosities — they directly inform how I design production systems.

I also bring strong algorithmic foundations: LeetCode Guardian (top 0.37% globally), Codeforces Expert, and 5-star on CodeChef. Beyond competing, I serve as a rated contest tester for LeetCode and a problem setter on Codeforces, CodeChef, and HackerEarth — sharpening my ability to evaluate trade-offs quickly and communicate technical ideas clearly.

I'd welcome the opportunity to discuss how my background aligns with what you're building. Thank you for your time and consideration.