~/nischal — zsh — 80×24

Nischal
Shrestha

Software Engineer

I build backend systems for a living and tinker with retro games, music, and football the rest of the time. This is my corner of the web.

Manassas, VA
$ whoami

Hey — I'm Nischal. I'm a software engineer, and for the last 7+ years I've worked mostly on backend systems: the kind of behind-the-scenes plumbing that quietly keeps things running. A lot of that has been Python and AWS, building services that have to stay up even when everything around them is having a bad day.

I like understanding how things fit together end to end — from the infrastructure underneath to the data model in the middle to the dashboards that tell me whether any of it actually worked. There's a real satisfaction in taking something fragile and making it boring and dependable.

Off the keyboard I'm usually deep in a retro game, listening to something, or watching football. This site is where I keep my notes and the occasional blog post — poke around.

// experience

Where I've shipped

May 2023
— Present
Software Engineer · Teltik Communications
East Brunswick, NJ · Remote

Own design, build, and on-call for a multi-tenant IoT/SIM management portal native to AWS — migrated infra to ECS Fargate and gave ops real-time visibility into 100k+ active SIMs. Built a distributed bulk-provisioning pipeline (10k+ ops/day with retries and exponential backoff) and a carrier-automation orchestrator that survives multi-hour sync sessions via checkpoint recovery. Swapped a synchronous SMS path for a Redis-backed pipeline and moved MySQL → Aurora, cutting DB read load 60%.

PythonFastAPI ECS FargateTerraform AuroraRedis
Feb 2021
— Apr 2023
Software Engineer · Gorin Systems
Jacksonville, FL

Championed a real code-review culture and CI/CD that dropped client onboarding from days to under 30 minutes. Led a bilingual semantic-search pipeline on OpenAI embeddings, taking search-failure rates from ~8% to under 0.5%. Built PySpark reconciliation tools ingesting 2M+ daily fleet records into S3/Redshift, plus a content-ingestion engine that turned weeks of manual XML wrangling into a minutes-long pipeline.

PythonPySpark GraphQLPostgreSQL RedshiftOpenAI
Jan 2019
— Feb 2021
Software Engineer · Leapfrog Technology
Seattle, WA

Built a multi-tiered credit-risk scoring engine in Java (underwriting thresholds in PostgreSQL) that cut manual turnaround 80%. Migrated legacy Python/PySpark ETL onto AWS with Terraform & CloudFormation across three environments, and parallelized a Selenium suite to take a 6-hour regression down to under 90 minutes. Led a team of three through agile delivery and the code-quality bar.

JavaPython TerraformCloudFormation Selenium
// selected work

Things I built that mattered

100k+ SIMs

Multi-tenant SIM management portal

AWS-native control plane for IoT SIM fleets — real-time status, bulk provisioning, and per-tenant isolation on ECS Fargate.

FastAPIFargateAurora
multi-hour jobs

Carrier automation orchestrator

A microservice that drives multi-hour carrier sync sessions and resumes cleanly from checkpoints when the network — inevitably — blinks.

PythonCeleryRedis
8% → <0.5%

Bilingual semantic search

Embedding-based search over a multi-vendor catalog that drove search-failure rates from ~8% down to under half a percent.

OpenAIPostgreSQLGraphQL
−80% turnaround

Credit-risk scoring engine

Tiered underwriting engine in Java evaluating threshold rules from PostgreSQL, cutting manual review turnaround by 80%.

JavaPostgreSQL
// stack

Tools I reach for

Languages
PythonJavaTypeScript JavaScriptNode.jsSQL
Backend
FastAPIDjangoExpress GraphQLCelerySQLAlchemy
Cloud & infra
AWSTerraformDocker KubernetesKafkaCloudflare
Data
PostgreSQLAuroraRedshift MongoDBRedisDynamoDB
Observability
OpenTelemetryGrafanaSentry ElasticsearchCloudWatch
// off the clock

When I'm not shipping

Games, old and new

FIFA, Valorant and CS:GO when I want a pulse — and lately a deep retro dive, replaying the whole Pokémon run: Yellow, FireRed, Crystal… Give me a good RPG and a weekend and I disappear.

Music, all of it

No genre loyalty here — the playlist swings from one thing to the next. Most of my best code ships with something playing.

Watching sport

Soccer first, NBA close behind. There's something about a well-run press or a late-game switch that scratches the same itch as good system design.

Long walks

My rubber-duck debugging happens on foot. Half the bugs I've fixed were actually solved a mile from the keyboard.

Anime

One Piece is the all-time favorite — been on that journey for years and not stopping. Currently watching Frieren: Beyond Journey's End and feeling things I didn't sign up for.

Manga & webtoons

Burned through Solo Leveling in a weekend — no regrets. Mid-way through The Beginning After the End and Tower of God, both doing damage to my sleep schedule.

$ ./say-hello

Say hi.

Always happy to talk shop, swap game recommendations, or argue about which Pokémon game aged best. My inbox is open — drop me a line.