Pratyush Kumar – Distributed systems engineer portfolio

Formerly at Enphase Energy · MSCS @ Penn State

Pratyush Kumar portrait

Pratyush Kumar

Backend Engineer

Performance Engineer

I build software systems that are fast, reliable, and built to hold up under real-world use.

Get in Touch

About

I build backend systems that stay fast, reliable, and correct under load.

I'm Pratyush, a software engineer focused on backend systems, distributed services, and performance engineering. I care about building software that is not just functional, but efficient, robust, and correct.

Backend systems

I design services and infrastructure that hold up under scale, failure, and operational complexity.

Performance engineering

I like profiling, benchmarking, and pushing systems closer to their hardware and concurrency limits.

Product systems

I like products with non-trivial backend logic, state management, and correctness constraints.

I'm currently pursuing an MS in Computer Science at Penn State, with a focus on backend systems and distributed systems.

Snapshot

5,500+

users supported through production IoT systems

25%

fewer integration failures at Enphase

7x

throughput improvement in C++ systems work

MSCS

focus on backend systems and distributed systems

Projects

Selected systems, products, and team collaborations I’ve built or contributed to.

Featured System

Distributed MapReduce Framework

C++ MapReduce engine deployed on EC2 with custom shuffle and performance tuning.

C++gRPCProtobufConcurrency+2
Featured Product

FairShare

Ledger-first expense tracker built for explainable balances, deterministic money handling, and safe retries.

JavaSpring BootPostgreSQLNext.js+2

More Projects

Holocron Timeline Engine

Graph-backed timeline system for causal traversal, break simulation, and world-state reconstruction.

FastAPINext.jsNeo4j+3

Distributed Key-Value Store (ABD)

Quorum-based key-value store comparing linearizable ABD against a blocking baseline.

C++gRPCProtobuf+2

App-Aware Clipboard Manager

Privacy-first macOS clipboard manager designed around correctness instead of feature bloat.

PythonPyQt6SQLite+2

Education & Experience

Where I've worked, studied, and what I shipped.

Education

Aug 2025 — May 2027

The Pennsylvania State University — MS in Computer Science

State College, PA

GPA: 3.7 / 4.0Focus: Distributed systems, Computer Vision, Deep Learning, and High-Performance Computing

  • Built depth across operating systems, computer architecture, and concurrent matrix computation with an emphasis on performance and hardware-aware systems design.

  • Expanded into computer vision and NLP through graduate coursework spanning vision-language models, deep learning for language, and advanced computer vision.

  • Applied that coursework in systems-heavy projects including a distributed MapReduce framework and a quorum-based key-value store.

Jul 2019 — May 2023

Vellore Institute of Technology — BTech in Computer Science and Engineering

Vellore, India

GPA: 3.5 / 4.0Focus: systems, networks, cryptography, and core computer science fundamentals

  • Built a capstone around selective region and partial face-image encryption.

  • Coursework included algorithms, operating systems, database systems, computer networks, and data structures.

Experience

Aug 2025 — Present

Penn State — Graduate Learning Assistant

State College, PA

Improved algorithmic proficiency for 60+ students by facilitating weekly lab sessions and real-time debugging support in C++ and MATLAB.

  • Led guided problem-solving sessions that helped students debug faster and build stronger systems-programming intuition.

  • Provided structured feedback during labs and office hours to improve student confidence and assignment quality.

Jan 2023 — Jul 2025

Enphase Energy — Software Engineer

Bangalore, India

Reduced production integration failures by 25% by improving microservice reliability and applying TDD for systems serving 5,500+ daily users.

  • Optimized API performance and SQL query efficiency by fixing bottlenecks surfaced through DataDog monitoring, reducing database load.

  • Decreased manual regression testing by 50% by integrating quality gates into Jenkins CI/CD and tightening engineering standards.

  • Reduced onboarding ramp-up time by 65% by automating legacy workflows and mentoring new engineers on production systems.

  • Contributed to global compliance features that helped support product expansion into European markets.

JavaRuby on RailsPostgreSQLJenkinsSonarQubeDataDogRSpec

Aug 2021 — Jan 2022

Acies Consulting — Full-Stack Developer Intern

Mumbai, India

Built workflow automation and data tooling that accelerated financial operations and improved backend interoperability.

  • Accelerated financial workflow setup from 3 days to 30 minutes by building interactive JavaScript and AJAX components for data operations.

  • Architected pluggable backend connectors so users could route workloads across MySQL, PostgreSQL, and Redis targets.

  • Automated stock-metric documentation with a Python and BeautifulSoup scraping pipeline for Yahoo Finance data.

DjangoJavaScriptAJAXPythonMySQLPostgreSQLRedisBeautifulSoup

Engineering Toolkit

The languages, frameworks, and delivery tools I use to build backend systems, performance-sensitive software, and infrastructure-heavy products.

Backend-firstProduction-testedSystems-minded

Systems & Core Languages

The foundation I use for performance-sensitive systems, APIs, and application logic.

C++
Python
Java
TypeScript
JavaScript
SQL
Multithreading

Backend & Distributed Systems

The stack behind production services, concurrency-heavy systems, and networked applications.

gRPC
Protobuf
REST APIs
AWS (EC2)
Concurrency
Distributed Systems
Quorum Protocols
Redis
PostgreSQL
MySQL

Frameworks & Product Engineering

The frameworks I reach for when shipping end-to-end products with real users and operational constraints.

Ruby on Rails
Spring Boot
FastAPI
Django
React
Next.js
Vite
PyQt6
Docker
Flyway
Supabase

Frontend & UI

Enough frontend depth to build interfaces that feel intentional, clear, and usable.

React
Next.js
Vite
Tailwind CSS
HTML
CSS
JavaScript

Delivery, Testing & Observability

The tooling I rely on to ship safely, monitor behavior, and improve reliability over time.

Git
Linux
Jenkins
pytest
RSpec
Selenium
DataDog
SonarQube
Unit & Integration Testing
Performance Benchmarking
Profiling

Data & Persistence

Storage and data tools used across product platforms, automation, and internal workflows.

PostgreSQL
MySQL
Redis
MongoDB
Neo4j

Contact

Let's talk about systems, products, and hard backend problems.

If you're building something real and need a steady engineering partner, I'd like to hear about it.

Resume available on request.