Senior Software Engineer · Distributed Systems · Applied AI
Nadeem Khan
I build and own high-scale distributed data platforms — 60M+ change events a day through Postgres CDC and Kafka, at 99%+ production reliability — where correctness and observability matter more than model novelty.
101 posts14 domainslatest 26 Aug 2026
Experience
EvolutionIQSenior Software Engineer
Mar 2026 — PresentNew York, US
Shipped a product extension surfacing critical claim data directly to adjusters, removing manual parsing of demand packages. Led a cross-stack refactor and introduced SQL query tagging for end-to-end performance visibility across jobs and routes.
CroweSenior Software Engineer, previously Cloud Senior Engineer
Jan 2022 — Mar 2026Chicago, US
Owned a distributed SQL execution platform and the CDC pipelines behind it — 60M+ Postgres change events and 10TB+ of batch data per day, at 99%+ reliability. Cut ETL runtime from 8 hours to 2.5 and cloud costs by roughly 40%.
Boston UniversityMSc Computer Science · Research & Teaching
Jan 2021 — Feb 2022Boston, US
Led product development for a public data-visualisation platform on US racial disparities at the Center for Antiracist Research (React, D3). Teaching assistant for MET CS 677, Data Science with Python.
CroweSenior Cloud Software Engineer · Backend Team Lead
Mar 2018 — Dec 2020India
Led a team of five building a horizontally scalable microservice platform for a SaaS product on Spring, Docker and Kubernetes, with autoscaling tuned to 70% average CPU.
Selected writing
All posts- How Kafka Really Works: Lessons from a 60M+ Events/Day Production Pipeline (opens on Medium)
Understanding Kafka's core architecture through real production experience at 60M+ events per day.
Backend & Infra
- Protecting PostgreSQL Primaries from Replication Slot Failures (opens on Medium)
Exporting slot telemetry and building an automated WAL protection control loop for high-throughput CDC pipelines.
Postgres Series
- PostgreSQL Logical Replication at Scale: Database-Side Guardrails for 60M+ Change Events (opens on Medium)
Configuring replication slots, WAL retention limits, failover strategy, and monitoring to protect the primary under sustained peak load.
Postgres Series
- How to Stop Your NL2SQL Agents From Crashing in Production: The Worker-Pool Pattern (opens on Medium)
A guide to process boundary isolation, preventing system-wide failures in LLM-driven data applications
AI System Design
- The 70B LLM Optimisation Playbook: From 57.5GB to 24.3GB Per GPU (opens on Medium)
A step-by-step guide to Weight, KV Cache, and Activation quantization (FP8 & 4-bit) to reclaim VRAM and unlock 2x performance.
AI System Design
- Scaling Contrastive Training: Batch Size, GPU Gathering, and Gradient Caching (opens on Medium)
Why bigger training batches make embedding models better, and how teams build batches too big for any single GPU to hold
Vector Databases
Latest
- Sharding and Partitioning at Scale: Splitting Billions of Vectors Across Machines (opens on Medium)
Past a single machine's ceiling, the only path forward is splitting the vector space across machines.
Vector Databases
- Storage Architecture: Memory, Disk, and Memory-Mapped Layouts at Billion-Vector Scale (opens on Medium)
How HNSW, IVF, and DiskANN each split storage between RAM and disk at billion-vector scale.
Vector Databases
- Indexing Deep Dive: DiskANN and Disk-Resident Graphs (opens on Medium)
Keeping almost everything on SSD and designing the graph so a few solid-state reads per query still hit HNSW-competitive recall.
Vector Databases
- Vector Compression and Quantisation: Fitting Billions of Vectors in Memory (opens on Medium)
A billion 768-dimensional float32 vectors take about 3 terabytes just for the raw numbers.
Vector Databases
- Indexing Deep Dive: IVF and IVF-PQ (opens on Medium)
HNSW buys speed and recall by keeping a graph, and every vector it touches, resident in RAM — IVF and IVF-PQ are what cluster-based systems reach for when that stops fitting.
Vector Databases
Skills
Languages
- Python
- Java
- SQL
- TypeScript
Data
- PostgreSQL
- Kafka
- Debezium
- Azure Synapse
- SQL Server
- MySQL
AI
- LangGraph
- NL2SQL
- RAG
- Vector Databases
- LLM Serving
Infra
- Azure
- Kubernetes
- Docker
- Spring Boot
- OpenTelemetry
- Azure DevOps