Fullstack + Infra Engineer • Open Source Contributor (Node.js Core) • Growth & Monetization Lead

📍 Based in India | Working Remotely — I lead and deliver high-impact end-to-end features and systems, combining product intuition with deep technical execution. I'm passionate about shipping reliable software, improving performance, and scaling systems.

• 🔧 Technical Depth: Contributed core improvements to Node.js HTTP/2 internals, fixing session lifecycle issues and enabling graceful shutdowns per RFC 7540.

• 🚀 Business Impact: Drove growth and monetization at Speechify by leading experiments across onboarding, landing pages, upsells, and subscription flows—directly improving revenue.

• 🧐 Ownership & Leadership: Led initiatives across observability, infrastructure, A/B testing frameworks, and production migrations with a focus on zero-downtime rollouts.

• ⚡️ Fast Learner: Debugged complex issues like Cloud Run memory leaks using Linux tools, re-architected CI pipelines, and shipped fullstack features across React, Svelte, Node.js, and Kubernetes.

• ❤️ Architect and scale systems across frontend, backend, and DevOps.
• 🧠 Solve hard engineering problems—from debugging memory leaks to optimizing cold starts.
• 📈 Run and scale product-led growth experiments from idea to production.

• Resolved a Cloud Run memory leak causing async job failures due to OOMs. Used Linux-level debugging to trace open handles and reduce container crashes.

• Led critical monetization and growth features:

  • Built reusable upsell and analytics libraries, boosting experiment velocity and UX consistency.
  • Ran A/B tests via ConfigCat + Amplitude, increasing purchases through optimized user funnels.
  • Improved event fidelity with Amplitude + GCP Monitoring + Slack alerts, proactively detecting regressions.

• Rewrote dubbing interface with Svelte, improving TTI and user satisfaction.

• Optimized landing performance with Vite, tree-shaking, CDN caching, video preloading, improving SEO scores and increasing conversions significantly.

• Coordinated and launched a zero-downtime migration of subscription entitlements across systems.

• Designed and built asynchronous workflows using AWS Lambda, SQS, and EventBridge for backend financial calculations.
• Enabled login-free, secure payments via a tokenized subdomain-routing system.
• Reduced API latency for large responses by 20% with Gzip compression in Nginx.
• Reduced AWS data transfer costs via log optimization and aggregation strategies.

• Developed Golang/NestJS microservices to manage ArgoCD apps and Helm chart lifecycles.
• Built a feature to allow users to register service accounts in their GitHub repos, enabling automated CI/CD deployments to Truefoundry-hosted Kubernetes clusters.
• Improved test reliability and reduced execution time using Jest and parallelization.

• Built and deployed a Node.js microservice on Kubernetes to compress/convert images to WebP, reducing size by 40% and improving load time.
• Collaborated with data team on data migration and dashboarding using SQL and Airbyte.

• Created a local Kubernetes testbed mirroring production infra, accelerating feedback cycles and cutting infra costs.
• Implemented Lighthouse CI for PR performance checks and used shell scripting to parallelize workflows.
• Set up observability stack with Prometheus, Grafana, and Loki.

PR: #57611 – Implement graceful shutdown of HTTP/2 server sessions with proper GOAWAY handling

Key Changes:

• Introduced kSessions symbol and a SafeSet to track active Http2Session instances.
• Added a closeAllSessions() helper to terminate sessions cleanly.
• Updated Http2Server.close() and Http2SecureServer.close() to:
  • Send GOAWAY frames.
  • Wait for in-flight streams to finish before closing.
• Refactored failing tests to align with new lifecycle.
• Ensured compliance with RFC 7540 §9.1 and .close() behavior parity with HTTP/1.

Impact:

• Prevents hanging processes due to lingering HTTP/2 sessions during shutdown.
• Properly rejects new streams after shutdown is initiated.
• Improves server stability and resource cleanup in production environments.
• Introduces a breaking change that aligns behavior with spec and expectations.

Why It Matters:
This fix resolves a long-standing issue where HTTP/2 servers in Node.js couldn't shut down cleanly—critical for production workloads like gRPC and streaming APIs. Improves system reliability and protocol compliance.

PR: #57808 – Fix premature termination of HTTP/2 sessions when sending empty payload responses

Key Changes:

• Deferred socket destruction until GOAWAY + headers were fully flushed by nghttp2.
• Used nghttp2_session_want_write/read to manage shutdown safely.
• Added callback-based finalization strategy between JS and C++ layers.
• Identified and fixed race conditions in flaky test test-http2-client-rststream-before-connect.js.

Impact:

• Guarantees reliable GOAWAY and header delivery for edge cases (e.g., empty responses).
• Improves lifecycle stability and test reliability across platforms.
• Enhances HTTP/2 compliance and eliminates silent failures.

Why It Matters:
Fixed a subtle but critical issue where GOAWAY and headers were silently dropped—especially for empty responses. This strengthens Node.js’s networking layer for high-reliability environments and makes tests more deterministic.

• ✨ ICPC Amritapuri Regionalist (2020) – Rank 365/3700+
• ✨ CodeChef September Lunchtime (2021) – Global Rank 31/10,000+
• ✨ LeetCode Biweekly Contest 75 – India Rank 15, Global Rank 104/16,300+
• ✨ CodeChef March Challenge Div 1 (2021) – Global Rank 64/30,000+, Top 6 in India
• ✨ Codeforces Round 786 Div 3 – Global Rank 74/25,000+
• ✨ CodeChef Goodies Winner – Top 6 in India (among 1000+ participants)
• ✨ Coding Ninjas Codekaze Round 2 – Global Rank 134/200,000+ (Top 0.06%)
• ✨ Google Kickstart Round A (2022) – Global Rank 468 (Top 2%), Handle: pandeykushagra
• ✨ Google Kickstart Round H (2021) – Global Rank 438, Handle: pandeykushagra

• 📧 Email: kushagra.pandey.iitd@gmail.com
• 👤 LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/pandeykushagra51
• 💻 GitHub: github.com/pandeykushagra51

⚡️ "Ship fast, break nothing, optimize everything."