Aromal S, Software Engineer

I build backend systems that scale.

Software engineer with 3+ years building multi-tenant platforms, secure networking and data infrastructure, mostly in Go.

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Aromal S sitting in front of rows of red incense bundles

When I'm not engineering

I spend my free time photographing Kerala's snake boat races, from the riverbank and from the sky, and cycling through the paddy fields.

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  • Sports photography

    Vallam Kali, Kerala's snake boat races, shot from the water's edge.

  • Aerial photography

    UAV pilot, framing races and landscapes from directly above.

  • Cycling

    Out through the paddy fields on my Aspect 930.

Experience

3+ years across five teams, from a MERN internship in 2021 to enterprise data platforms at IBM.

IBMKerala PoliceKathaTurnkeyIncredible Visibility
20222023202420252026

  1. 2023

    Aug 2023 - Present

    3 yrs 3 mos

    IBM India Software Labs

    Kochi, Kerala · Full-time, hybrid

    Building IBM watsonx.data, a cloud-native lakehouse that runs analytics and GenAI workloads on open data formats.

    Software Engineer, Mid-SeniorPromoted

    Sep 2024 - Present

    • Led the move from single-tenant to multi-tenant databases, cutting infrastructure cost by about 98%.
    • Built a secure multi-tenant reverse tunnel in Go with mTLS, Yamux multiplexing and Redis-backed registration.
    • Contributed to Bring Your Own Cloud on Azure, extending Console APIs across a split control and data plane.
    • Cut Milvus hybrid vector search response times by up to 80% for large GenAI lakehouse workloads.
    • Built durable provisioning workflows on Temporal with idempotent activities, retries and task-level status.
    • Owned SOC 2, FIPS and FedRAMP readiness across 5+ core components as Developer Security Focal.
    • Go
    • Temporal
    • Redis
    • Azure
    • Kubernetes
    • Milvus

    Software Engineer

    Aug 2023 - Sep 2024

    • Helped integrate Apache Spark (IBM Analytics Engine) natively into the platform.
    • Shipped Bring Your Own JAR, letting customers plug JDBC drivers like SAP HANA into Presto engines.
    • Built REST APIs integrating Presto, Spark, Db2, Netezza and Milvus.
    • Re-architected Parquet ingestion, fixing 15+ high-impact defects and enabling high-throughput bulk loads.
    • Built a Go SDK and published the OpenAPI reference on IBM Docs.
    • Remediated critical CVEs surfaced by dependency, static analysis and container scans.
    • Go
    • Presto
    • Apache Spark
    • PostgreSQL
    • Docker
    • OpenAPI

    On-call SME for production issues at enterprise customers including Adobe, Scuderia Ferrari and EY.

  2. 2023

    Jul 2023 - Aug 2023

    2 mos

    Kerala Police

    Thiruvananthapuram, Kerala · Apprenticeship, on-site

    Software Developer

    Jul 2023 - Aug 2023

    • Built an internal application with machine learning features for the CBCID Special Branch, guided by an IPS officer.
    • Worked across the front end and a Django REST Framework API.
    • Python
    • Django REST Framework
    • Machine learning

  3. 2022

    May 2022 - Jun 2023

    1 yr 2 mos

    Katha Ads

    Kochi, Kerala · Internship, hybrid

    Katha is a Malayalam audio news app with 200K+ downloads. Katha Ads is its WhatsApp-first hyper-local ad platform, reaching 1.2 crore+ readers.

    Software Engineer Intern IIPromoted

    Nov 2022 - Jun 2023

    • Integrated an AI text-to-speech engine for automated news narration.
    • Built B2B web apps with Next.js and Tailwind CSS.
    • Wrote the analytics SQL, reports and dashboards for an ad platform with an audience of 1 crore+.
    • Designed schemas, indexes and query plans on MySQL.
    • Built the in-app FIFA World Cup 2022 prediction game.
    • Next.js
    • MySQL
    • Tailwind CSS

    Software Engineer Intern

    May 2022 - Oct 2022

    • Built Rails APIs on MySQL with Redis caching for the Katha news app.
    • Wrote and maintained 60+ web scrapers in Ruby with Nokogiri.
    • Moved heavy work to Sidekiq background jobs and built mailers on AWS SES.
    • Added speech synthesis with Google Cloud SSML and translation with Azure.
    • Ruby on Rails
    • Redis
    • Sidekiq
    • AWS SES

  4. 2022

    Apr 2022

    1 mo

    Turnkey Tech Solutions

    Pune, remote · Internship

    Client work for Embifi, a B2B checkout financing and lending startup.

    Software Engineer Intern

    Apr 2022

    • Built and tested serverless APIs on AWS Lambda in Python and JavaScript.
    • Built the MVP web app in React and Tailwind CSS.
    • Modelled data on MySQL (AWS RDS) and MongoDB Atlas.
    • Shipped in Jira sprints, iterating on client feedback.
    • AWS Lambda
    • Python
    • React
    • MongoDB

  5. 2021

    Aug 2021 - Nov 2021

    4 mos

    Incredible Visibility

    Kollam, Kerala · Internship

    Technical Intern, MERN Stack

    Aug 2021 - Nov 2021

    • Built web apps and server-side services with MongoDB, Express, React and Node.js.
    • Worked on the site for Blind Weight, a numberless scale for eating disorder recovery.
    • Built PlayMyPlaylist at an internal hackathon: a real-time PWA music guessing game.
    • MongoDB
    • Express
    • React
    • Node.js

Side projects

Toolbox

Languages
Go, JavaScript, Ruby, Python, C, Java
Frameworks
React, Next.js, Ruby on Rails, Node.js, Flask, FastAPI
Platforms
Docker, Kubernetes, Linux, AWS, Azure, IBM Cloud, Git, Claude
Databases
PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, MongoDB