$ whoami
Hi, I'm Kunal.
Backend engineer. I design and ship data-heavy systems on AWS — pipelines, APIs, and event-driven services that hold up in production.
I write about that work here: the working patterns, the failure modes,
and the exact configs — because that's what I wish existed when I was
debugging SignatureDoesNotMatch at 2am.
Every article ships with a GitHub repo you can clone and run. If a tutorial here doesn't work end-to-end, that's a bug — file an issue.
// what I've built
Enterprise-scale data pipelines. At a Big Four consulting firm, I was a core engineer on a change-management SaaS platform used by 150+ global enterprise clients. I built and optimized ingestion pipelines processing 20M+ records per day, and cut end-to-end pipeline latency by 35% through query optimization, task batching, and smarter Celery orchestration. When a pipeline that feeds executive dashboards for Fortune 500 clients slows down, someone notices — my job was making sure nobody ever did.
A backend-as-a-service, solo. I'm the founder of APIEngine — a developer-first BaaS with instant CRUD APIs, auth, multi-tenancy, custom objects, a React SDK, request observability, and an API simulator. Django/DRF, PostgreSQL, Redis, deployed on GCP. Designed, built, shipped, and operated by one person: me. Nothing teaches you backend engineering like being the only one on call for your own production system.
Real-time systems. I built MeshEngine, a drone mesh-network simulator pushing live state over WebSockets with Redis Pub/Sub fan-out — the kind of architecture that shows up later in every real-time dashboard and notification system I touch.
// how I work
- Python-first: Django, DRF, FastAPI, Celery — with PostgreSQL and Redis doing the heavy lifting underneath.
- AWS in practice: S3, SQS/SNS, IAM, EC2, Lambda — currently deepening this with the AWS Developer Associate (DVA-C02) track, every lab documented and published here with runnable repos.
- Event-driven by default: queues, pub/sub, and idempotent workers over brittle synchronous chains.
- I write it down: architecture decisions, runbooks, post-mortems. I've published technical work for Getint, Unite.AI, and Medium — including a CI/CD comparison piece that ranked #3 on Google and got cited in AI Overviews.
// work with me
I'm currently open to:
- Full-time backend / AWS engineering roles — teams shipping data-intensive or event-driven systems in Python.
- Freelance backend development — API design and build-outs, pipeline work, AWS integrations, Django/FastAPI services.
- Freelance technical writing — tutorials, documentation, and engineering blog posts, always backed by working code.
If you've read something here and want the person who wrote it on your problem: hello@kunalships.dev or use the contact form.
// stack
Python · Django · FastAPI · Celery · Redis · PostgreSQL · AWS · GCP
// elsewhere