Available for opportunities

Building reliable
backend systems
at scale.

Backend engineer focused on distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, observability and practical AI. Previously at Zscaler and Palo Alto Networks.

View Experience LinkedIn ↗
5+
Years experience
100K+
Malware samples processed
2×
Hackathon winner
About

Backend systems, reliability & intelligent tooling

I’m a backend engineer with 5+ years of experience building distributed services and cloud infrastructure with a strong focus on reliability, observability, and practical AI tooling.

At Zscaler I work on infrastructure for enforcement nodes — health probing, service-level status aggregation, and production metrics that keep high-scale traffic systems observable. Previously at Palo Alto Networks I owned large data pipelines processing 100K+ malware samples and built internal RAG tooling for on-call engineers.

I care about systems that stay honest under partial failure, metrics that don’t lie, and infrastructure that is both scalable and operable — with AI used where it actually accelerates engineering.

Reliability first

Health probing, honest partial-failure reporting, and metrics that stay bounded and truthful.

Cloud & data at scale

GCP & AWS pipelines, Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, BigQuery — processing hundreds of thousands of samples.

Practical AI tooling

RAG-based engineering assistants and LLM-powered threat intelligence used by real teams.

Experience

Where I’ve built systems

From high-scale network enforcement to malware analytics platforms and intelligent internal tools.

ZscalerStaff Software EngineerMar 2026 – Present
ZIA · AWS Infrastructure
  • Contributed to backend infrastructure for Zscaler enforcement nodes on AWS, ensuring systems that process traffic flows and apply security policies are reliable and observable at scale.
  • Designed active health probing for load-balancer dependencies in an Open vSwitch controller, discovering targets from fabric config and converting silent failures into immediate signals.
  • Built service-level health aggregation that honestly reports partial failures (up / down / degraded) instead of binary all-or-nothing status.
  • Implemented production observability with multi-layer metrics so dashboards and alerting reflect live system state without unbounded memory growth.
Palo Alto NetworksStaff EngineerAug 2022 – Feb 2026
WildFire Malware Detection Platform
  • Designed and deployed an autonomous malware collection pipeline on GCP (Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, BigQuery) processing 100K+ malware samples.
  • Built real-time data pipelines integrating BigQuery and Looker Studio for malware trend analysis and operational visibility.
  • Developed an internal RAG-based engineering assistant using LLaMA 2, Ollama, and ChromaDB to accelerate troubleshooting and knowledge retrieval.
  • Led security enhancements including SAML vulnerability remediation and secret-management; migrated services from CentOS to Ubuntu.
  • Owned proactive customer incident management and on-call support for production reliability.
Parallel WirelessData EngineerDec 2021 – Jul 2022
  • Built Grafana dashboards querying ClickHouse and Prometheus for real-time alert monitoring.
  • Converted Install/Upgrade codebase from Bash to Python using the Kubernetes client library.
  • Resolved critical production bugs and delivered features involving ClickHouse and data processing pipelines.
Anuta NetworksSoftware Engineering InternJul 2021 – Nov 2021
  • Built core functionalities for ATOM network automation platform with Docker, Kubernetes and Jenkins.
Skills

Technical toolkit

Languages, cloud platforms, observability, systems and AI tooling I use to build reliable infrastructure.

Programming

PythonGoCData StructuresAlgorithms

Cloud & Distributed

GCPAWSKubernetesDockerKafkaPub/SubCloud RunDistributed Systems

Backend & Observability

PrometheusGrafanaHealth ProbingMetrics DesignService ReliabilityREST APIs

Networking & Systems

Open vSwitchTCP/IPHTTPLinuxOSI Model

Security & AI

RAGLLaMA 2OllamaChromaDBThreat IntelligenceSecret Management

Data & Tools

BigQueryClickHouseMySQLLooker StudioGitJIRA
Selected Work

Projects & achievements

Hackathon wins and internal tools that shipped real value to teams.

Hackathon Winner · Crucible 2.0

Darkfire

Advanced dark web threat-intelligence tool powered by LLMs for real-time monitoring and analysis. Built during Palo Alto Networks India Hackathon.

LLMsThreat IntelligencePython
Hackathon Winner · AI Mastermind

Social Media Analytics Platform

AI-powered social media analytics platform developed for the Palo Alto Networks AI Mastermind Challenge.

AI / MLAnalyticsPython
Internal Tool

WildFire CoPilot

RAG-based engineering assistant using LLaMA 2 + ChromaDB that helps on-call engineers troubleshoot faster by retrieving internal documentation context.

RAGLLaMA 2OllamaChromaDB
Production Pipeline

Autonomous Malware Collection

End-to-end GCP pipeline (Cloud Run, Pub/Sub, BigQuery) that autonomously collected and processed 100K+ malware samples for the WildFire platform.

GCPCloud RunBigQueryPub/Sub
Contact

Let’s build something reliable

Open to backend, distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and innovative AI work. Currently based in Bengaluru.

Harshak1720@gmail.com LinkedIn Website