Vaibhav Garg — Backend Engineer

ThotExperiment

Software Engineer · NYC, USA · 03/2025 — present

▸ Cut average API latency from 300 ms to 50 ms by splitting the Node monolith into focused Dockerized Go and Java services, moving background jobs to AWS Lambda, and adding Kubernetes HPA for traffic spikes.
▸ Engineered an infinite Nearby feed in Go using Redis ranking, preference matching, radius expansion, stable pagination, and duplicate prevention. 10 ms p50 at the service and 50 ms p99 on scroll.
▸ Ran services on AWS EKS with private ClusterIP, autoscaling through HPA and node groups, and access through IAM, IRSA, subnets, security groups, and internal load balancers.
▸ Automated photo moderation with Redis queues and AWS Rekognition, cutting review time from hours to near real time.
▸ Shipped Travel Mode with map-based destination selection, travel-aware APIs, and separate free preview and paid access.
▸ Built a preference-matched Global Chat service in Go with asynchronous text moderation using Redis queues, regex rules, and a classifier. Posts reached about 20× more users than profile-only discovery.
▸ Introduced NATS JetStream for service-to-service communication, replacing tightly coupled API calls with asynchronous events while keeping MongoDB as the source of truth.

Graduate Teaching Assistant · Boston, USA · 09/2023 — 12/2024

▸ Office hours for 350+ graduate students on database design, schema, integrity constraints, and complex SQL.
▸ Designed exams, graded projects, and mentored master’s students in CS5200. Average course scores rose about 10%.

Software Developer · Pune · 11/2020 — 12/2022

▸ Designed the low-level architecture that converted batch credit processing to a real-time API, reducing turnaround from hours to seconds.
▸ Built a commercial product orchestrator coordinating downstream gRPC and REST services for credit data aggregation.
▸ Created a universal validation library so REST APIs validate against XML-defined rules without code changes.
▸ Delivered a proof of concept for a reusable orchestration framework that accelerated rollout across new TransUnion regions.
▸ Ran a proof of concept evaluating gRPC, Envoy, and Kuma Mesh for service-mesh adoption.
▸ Reached 90%+ JUnit coverage and resolved encryption and security findings from SonarQube, Black Duck, and Checkmarx. An async Kafka pipeline logged inquiry and billing for 200K+ events a day.

Software Intern · Chennai, India · 02/2020 — 04/2020

▸ Developed gRPC microservices, defined service contracts with Protocol Buffers, and used PostgreSQL plus internal shell sessions to test and troubleshoot.