I am Vivek Agrawal
I build reliable backend systems that scale quietly, fail loudly, and stay maintainable for years.
What I do
I design and build backend systems that prioritize clarity, long-term maintainability, and predictable failure over clever abstractions. Most of my work lives behind the scenes—handling data, integrations, and infrastructure that other systems quietly depend on.
- Design for longevity — systems should be understandable years later by someone who didn’t write them.
- Prefer explicit over clever — clear boundaries, reliable abstractions, and predictable behavior beat novelty.
- Optimize for failure modes — things will break; the job is to make failures obvious, contained, and recoverable.
If you’re interested in the kind of systems I build, you can explore a few selected projects below.
Selected work
A small selection of systems and tools I’ve worked on—focused on backend architecture, infrastructure, and long-term maintainability.
I help founders and teams build backend systems that need to be correct, scalable, and reliable in production — from trading engines and payments to automation and internal platforms.
CoinSwitch eXchange (CSX): High-Throughput Trading & Matching Engine
Built and led the core of a crypto trading platform: an in-memory, event-sourced matching engine with strict ordering, exactly-once processing, and high availability. Designed to ensure no order loss, predictable recovery, and correctness under heavy concurrency.
Focus: Distributed Systems · Event Sourcing · CQRS · Matching Engines · Go · Microservices
Automated Web Crawling & Content Analysis System
Designed and built a scalable crawler that scans thousands of web pages daily, detects content violations against a 400k-phrase blacklist, and generates auditable evidence with screenshots — fully replacing a manual compliance workflow.
Focus: Node.js · Puppeteer · Redis · Queues · High-Performance Text Matching · AWS
Opinionated Node.js Backend Framework
Created an opinionated backend framework to eliminate OpenAPI drift, enforce architectural boundaries, guarantee input/output validation, and accelerate development without sacrificing correctness. Designed for speed through constraints.
Focus: Node.js · DDD · Dependency Injection · OpenAPI · Transactions · Structured Logging
Blockchain Payments & Settlement System
Built a production-grade blockchain payments module supporting one-time and recurring transactions, refunds, reversals, and multi-party settlements, with on-chain events as the source of truth and reliable off-chain reconciliation.
Focus: Blockchain · Ethereum · Smart Contracts · Subgraph Indexing · Payments · Backend Systems
Have a tech problem that needs solving?
I work best on systems that need to be correct, stable, and reliable in production.