Ayaan Retiwala

Platform Engineer

India | Remote

About

I built the core of Excloud's cloud platform from scratch: compute and virtualization, block storage, managed Kubernetes, networking, identity, managed databases, the shared libraries the services run on, and the SDK, CLI, console, and Terraform provider people use to drive it. Mostly Go, with TypeScript and React for product surfaces and Swift for native macOS tools. The hard part of platform work is almost never the happy path, and that is the half I am good at.

Experience

Excloud Platform Engineer

Jun 2023 to Aug 2026 | Remote

Public cloud with 4,000+ accounts, 380 active VMs, and 140 running managed Postgres clusters at handover; built and operated the core platform alongside the engineering lead and handled production escalations directly.

  • Designed and built the block storage engine on SPDK and NVMe-oF, with a reconciler that converges database intent against live bdev, lvol, and RAID state so a crash mid-provision recovers instead of orphaning volumes.
  • Implemented the VFIO-user data path from SPDK-backed RAID devices into QEMU guests, with per-VM NQNs and sockets, idempotent attach and detach, and readiness checks before a guest sees the disk.
  • Built the Go compute control plane over QEMU/KVM: VM lifecycle APIs, rescue boot, volume attach and reap, subnet operations, and reconciliation after failed transitions.
  • Shipped managed Kubernetes end to end: control-plane and worker bootstrap, OIDC and JWKS, Cilium and CoreDNS, a CSI driver with attach, mount, resize, and failover, and the Karpenter cloud provider that autoscales nodes.
  • Wrote the shared Go layer the services are built on: an HTTP framework that derives OpenAPI 3.1 from Go types by reflection, a typed error taxonomy, cross-service domain types, and OpenTelemetry middleware, imported across 20+ internal services.
  • Traced a borrowed-header lifetime bug through the HTTP/2 and HPACK layer of the Kubernetes API transport and fixed it without losing OpenTelemetry trace propagation.
  • Built authoritative DNS with AXFR, TSIG, and weighted records, and an AF_PACKET ARP and NDP proxy with BPF filtering, VLAN handling, rate limits, GARP, and IPv6 DAD.
  • Built the API-to-client pipeline from OpenAPI 3.1 across eight services, feeding the exc Go SDK and CLI plus a generated Terraform provider with 30 resources and 13 data sources.

Projects

DBConsole

Electron, Vite, Next.js, PostgreSQL

Postgres workbench for web and macOS with SQL safety checks, server-side result streaming, schema graphs, and encrypted named-query sync with conflict resolution. 19 tagged releases.

CBManager

Swift, AppKit, SQLite, Vision

Native macOS clipboard manager with global shortcut and paste-back, OCR over copied images, fuzzy and semantic search, SQLite WAL writes, 162 test methods, CI, and DMG packaging.

Rig

React, Vite, Fastify, WebSockets

Dispatch console for the pi coding agent with live tool-call streaming, model and thinking-level selection, resume and stop controls, and Telegram or REST operator access.

Tachyon

PWA, offline-first

Manga-reader PWA with offline reading, source integration, auto-scroll, AniList sync, and a test suite built around async state and race conditions.

Skills

Languages: Go, C, TypeScript, Swift, Python

Infrastructure: Kubernetes, QEMU/KVM, Firecracker, SPDK, NVMe-oF, VFIO-user, CSI, Karpenter, Linux, systemd

Data: PostgreSQL, SQLite, Valkey, ClickHouse, Kafka/KRaft, OpenTelemetry

Developer platform: OpenAPI 3.1, code generation, Terraform Plugin Framework, GitHub Actions

Networking: DNS, AXFR, TSIG, ARP/NDP, IPv4/IPv6, HTTP/2, TLS