Prakhar Pandey

Backend & Protocol Engineer

Karnot Technologies · Jun 2024 – Present · Gurugram, India

• Contribute across the entire Madara stack (sequencer, orchestrator, SNOS, bootstrapper, bridge, and E2E tests), an open-source Rust framework for Starknet appchains; 84 PRs merged to main, and a core contributor to SNOS as well. Designed and built the one-click deployment system and pricing service.
• Madara powers 4 production chains across mainnet, testnet, and devnet, including Paradex (Starknet's first appchain: $250B+ cumulative volume, $1B+ daily, 70k+ users) and Privily; it has sustained 5,000+ TPS for a day on an L3 (Gridy.fun), well beyond current production load.
• Built a one-click deployment system (Go + Kubernetes) that provisions a full appchain (sequencer, full nodes, orchestrator, bridge & faucet, databases, explorer, monitoring) from a parameterized Helm chart, continuously delivered through Argo CD with a GitOps workflow (automated sync and self-healing). Brings a new chain online in ~10 minutes versus 1–3 days of manual setup that tied up 2–3 engineers; the stack it runs costs under $2.5k/month in infra, a fraction of typical appchain operating costs.
• Built the validation & observability tooling that keeps the sequencer correct in production: a transaction-replay harness that re-runs upstream-chain traffic against Madara, a differential checker that executes the same transactions on Madara and the reference sequencer to catch divergences, and an alerting service that surfaces execution bugs before they reach mainnet.
• Built and own the cross-chain token bridge and faucet, plus a chain indexer (Deno + Apibara), to move and track assets between the appchain and Ethereum.
• Keep live chains reliable: on-call, Prometheus/Grafana alerting, and orchestrator hardening (distributed locking, priority job scheduling); also built client-facing backend services in Go (Fiber, GORM, PostgreSQL).
• Built the customer dashboard (Next.js), authored PRDs and technical docs, and worked directly with clients (e.g. Paradex) to debug production issues.

Skills involved: Rust, Go, TypeScript, Python, Kubernetes, Helm, Argo CD, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis, AWS, Prometheus, Grafana, Deno, Apibara, Starknet, Ethereum

Backend Developer

LettFaktura · Dec 2023 – Jun 2025 · Remote (Ireland)

• Primary developer (team of 4) building the cloud version of an invoicing product with a ~50k-user install base; built the REST API in Node.js (Fastify, Sequelize, Redis) on a multi-tenant PostgreSQL schema.
• Implemented a Redis-backed rate limiter from scratch to protect the API against abuse and basic DoS.

Skills involved: Node.js, Fastify, Sequelize, Redis, PostgreSQL

Software Engineer Intern

Newzera Tech Labs · May 2021 – Jul 2021

• Built GraphQL APIs with Redis server-side caching; integrated crash reporting (Crashlytics, BugSnag) and wrote Jest/Enzyme tests.

Data Science Intern

Ank Aha! · May 2020 – Jul 2020

Built a pipeline to extract structured tables from scanned PDFs (table detection via transfer learning with Detectron2), alongside SpaCy/NLTK text classification and multiprocessing scrapers over 6,500+ records.

Paralend: Parallel Lending Protocol · ETHOnline 2025 · 1st Prize, Arcology Track

Parallel DeFi lending protocol hitting ~1,000–5,000 TPS (vs ~10–20 for sequential protocols) via batching plus a netting optimization that cut global state writes by 99%. Built on Arcology's parallel execution; forks Compound V2's lending logic. Solidity.

hop6: Peer-to-Peer Encrypted Messenger · Rust

A serverless P2P terminal messenger that runs entirely over the Tor network (v3 onion services): no central server, a persistent onion identity, and a newline-delimited JSON wire protocol. Built in Rust with tokio and ratatui.

Aegis: Zcash Shielded Transaction Library · Rust · Zypherpunk 2025

A Rust library for building Zcash shielded transactions from transparent UTXOs using the PCZT standard, with zero-knowledge proofs and secure key handling.

Deep Reinforcement Learning: CS698R, IIT Kanpur · Python · 2021

Implemented Deep Q-Networks with multiple reward strategies for a constrained foraging task; research-driven, synthesizing peer-reviewed literature.

Indian Institute of Technology Kanpur · 2018 – 2022

B.Tech, Mechanical Engineering, 8.3/10.