Shriram Sudharsan
Backend engineer at Zoho Payments. I build systems that have to be correct, resilient and fast at once, and I like the architecture problem underneath them most.
Now
Most of my time goes into Java services on PostgreSQL and Redis: integrations with external providers that fail constantly, state that has to stay correct, and a data layer that holds up as volume grows. The product is identity verification, the checks that decide whether a merchant can start transacting.
Lately I'm drawn to the architecture side: reshaping a system built for one product so new business verticals plug in without rewrites. This quarter that means moving service configuration off from loading at server startup onto runtime, database-driven updates over Kafka. Outside work I'm building Alfred, an orchestrator for AI coding-agent sessions.
Selected work
Runs Claude Code, OpenCode and Codex sessions through explicit state machines and an append-only event log.
Middleware that classifies agent tasks and gates them behind approval before they reach external services.
Failover routing across providers
Round-robin, weighted and circuit-breaker strategies with automatic failover and cost-aware routing.
Request types, statuses and field-visibility rules moved into the database, so a lending product onboarded with zero core rewrites.
A ten-table join, from minutes to seconds
A ten-table join replaced by grouped queries merged in memory, plus 46 redundant database calls removed per verification job run.
Writing
Reading
On the desk: Designing Data-Intensive Applications by Martin Kleppmann, and the second half of Alex Xu's System Design Interview. The rest of the shelf.
Contact
Always happy to talk backend architecture, distributed systems or consumer tech. Email is best: shriram.sudharsan@gmail.com. Code is on GitHub.