Hi, my name is
Sivabalan Balasubramanian
I build systems that scale under pressure.
Senior Platform Engineer with 11+ years designing async platforms, rule engines, and high-throughput APIs across FinTech and Banking. Currently building AI-powered developer tools — on-device privacy gates and intelligent automation workflows.
Recent
Recent Work & Writing
articleseries · 6 parts
Learning AI Engineering by Building
None of My Projects Need Fine-Tuning After building evaluation frameworks, embedding pipelines, tool-use agents, and ReAct loops across three projects, I evaluated each one for fine-tuning. The answer
ai-engineeringfine-tuningpython
articleseries · 1 parts
How I Think About System Design
The Systems That Held Up Every system I've built that survived production had one thing in common: the architecture wasn't clever. The decisions were clear, the constraints were respected, and when th
system-designarchitecture
perspective
When Work Becomes Life
Monday standups at my jobs abroad often started with weekend stories. One colleague was raising chickens and had strong opinions about coop design. Another was rebuilding a car engine in his garage, p
culturecareerwork-life
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The Mental Shift That Made AI Coding Tools Work for Me
The Setup That Changed Everything A colleague tried Claude Code for a week and gave up. "It's slower than writing the code myself." I'd said the exact same thing six months earlier. Now I ship feature
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How I Built This Portfolio
A Portfolio Should Be a Graph, Not a Landing Page I wanted this portfolio to be an engineering knowledge base — where every article, case study, experiment, and note is cross-linked. Where a visitor r
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Regex vs On-Device LLM for PII Detection: A 25-Case Benchmark
The Problem PII detection in text is traditionally handled by regex — pattern matching for SSNs, credit cards, emails, phone numbers. It's fast (0.05ms per item) and works for obvious patterns. But re
pythonllmsecurity
Experience
Where I've Worked
Senior Software Engineer
Jul 2024 — PresentACV Auctions
Chennai, IndiaDesigned a modular Rule Engine Platform for credit decisioning, reducing manual review by ~30%. Built a high-throughput FastAPI Performance API with async pipelines achieving ~50% lower latency. Improved observability with structured logging and Datadog APM dashboards.
FastAPIPythonKubernetesPostgreSQLDatadog
Case Study: Rule EngineLead Engineer
Feb 2022 — Jul 2024Lloyds Banking Group
London, UKEngineered low-latency aiohttp async APIs processing millions of regulatory events. Designed Kubernetes workloads with HPA, mTLS, and Spinnaker deployments. Led FaaS pod architecture reducing resource footprint. Reduced pod memory by ~20% through streaming patterns.
aiohttpKubernetesSpinnakerSplunkReact
View projectFull Stack Developer
Sep 2019 — Jan 2022Tiger Analytics
Chennai, IndiaLed end-to-end delivery across backend, frontend, and analytics layers. Built Flask applications with D3.js visualizations for PE firms and BFS/CPG clients. Optimized SQL schemas and ingestion pipelines for high-volume datasets.
FlaskD3.jsReactAngularAzurePower BI
Python Developer
Apr 2018 — Jul 2019KONE
Chennai, IndiaBuilt high-performance Tornado web applications for real-time operational reporting. Improved CI/CD workflows with Jenkins and Docker. Developed Wireshark dissectors in Lua for network protocol analysis.
PythonTornadoDockerJenkinsLua
Python Developer
May 2017 — Dec 2017K7 Computing
Chennai, IndiaBuilt automated scraping pipelines using Requests, BeautifulSoup, and Selenium. Developed ETL workflows and ingestion tools for high-frequency MySQL database updates.
PythonSeleniumBeautifulSoupMySQLETL
Oracle DBA
Jan 2014 — Dec 2015Tata Consultancy Services
Chennai, IndiaPerformed Oracle performance tuning, indexing, and materialized view optimizations. Automated backup and import workflows with Bash scripts across multiple environments.
OracleSQLBashPerformance Tuning
About
A Bit About Me
I got my start as an Oracle DBA and spent years learning how data actually moves — slowly, expensively, and usually at the worst possible time. That shaped how I think about backend systems: reliability and observability aren't features, they're the foundation.
Over 11 years I've worked through Chennai, London, and across global remote teams — from regulated banking infrastructure at Lloyds to credit decisioning systems at ACV Auctions. The problems that interest me most sit at the intersection of correctness and speed: how do you process a million financial events without dropping any, and still ship on Friday?
Lately I've been drawn to AI tooling — not the hype, but the practical side. On-device models that keep data private. Commit generators that match your team's style. Tools that actually reduce the friction of building software.
MS in Computer Science from California State University, Sacramento. Based in Chennai.
Technologies I work with:
▸Python (asyncio, FastAPI)▸Distributed Systems▸Kubernetes / Docker▸PostgreSQL / Oracle▸System Design▸aiohttp / Tornado▸React / TypeScript▸AWS / GCP / Azure▸CI/CD Pipelines▸Datadog / Splunk▸Rule Engines▸ETL Pipelines
Let's talk.
Have a problem worth solving or something interesting to share? I'd love to hear from you.