Bangalore · IST
Hi, I’m Archit Sharma.
I build and run distributed systems.
Performance engineering at Red Hat, blockchain infrastructure since 2018, and now a second brain at Kurv Tech.
~/arcolife > ls
Building a second brain at Kurv Tech, which I started in 2021.
Alongside it, I take on DevOps and blockchain infrastructure work through Toptal.
I started in performance and scale engineering at Red Hat (2014–2018), on the Cloud Suite: OpenShift, OpenStack, RHV and Satellite. I wrote Sarjitsu to make sense of SAR data.
Then came startups. I led engineering and consensus R&D for a public blockchain, led engineering and infrastructure for a computer-vision product that diagnoses diabetic retinopathy, and ran site reliability for another public blockchain. Since 2022 I have freelanced through Toptal on DeFi, DePIN and L1 infrastructure.
In 2021 I started Kurv Tech, where I am building a second brain: software that remembers what you read and acts on it.
- 2022–now Toptal Freelance DevOps and blockchain engineer
- 2021–now Kurv Tech Founder
- 2019–20 CasperLabs Site reliability engineer
- 2018–19 Rayd8 Chief software architect
- 2018–18 TrueChain R&D consensus lead, head of engineering
- 2014–18 Red Hat Performance engineering, R&D
- 2013–13 CERN openlab Summer student
- 2020-02-07 GRA FCUK? NAh
- 2017-04-30 Recovering encrypted LVM based partitions, after accidentally overwriting 'em with 'fio'!
- 2017-03-02 performance engineering TILs - part 1
- 2017-02-22 resizing an xfs partition on a thin provisoned disk in a RHVM env
- 2017-01-25 never go back, but never forget
- email archit@pm.me
- github arcolife
- linkedin in/arcolife
- x @arcolife
- speaker deck arcolife
- keybase archit
- toptal top 3%
- about · now · work the tabs above, by name
- writing · connect latest posts; email and elsewhere
- cv open the CV
- search <words> search everything (also ⌘K)
- theme flip light and dark
“In my quest for an answer to nature's existence, I wish to be an inter-galactic hitchhiker.”
Don’t panic.
~/arcolife/now
Kurv Tech
I started Kurv Tech in 2021. We are building three products that share one idea: software should remember what you were doing and carry it forward.
- kenby.ai in development Kenby A memory and research workspace. Follow a thought across notes and saved sources, read the original, and pick up where you left off. The successor to MoaRAG. by Kurv Tech ↗
- temmo.run in development Temmo An agent harness and CLI. Hand it an outcome; it carries the context through to completion. by Kurv Tech ↗
- elvs.run placeholder Elvs Workers and messaging connectors, starting with Slack and Telegram. by Kurv Tech ↗
~/arcolife/about
Thirteen years of making systems behave.
I started in performance and scale engineering at Red Hat (2014–2018), on the Cloud Suite: OpenShift, OpenStack, RHV and Satellite. I wrote Sarjitsu to make sense of SAR data.
Then came startups. I led engineering and consensus R&D for a public blockchain, led engineering and infrastructure for a computer-vision product that diagnoses diabetic retinopathy, and ran site reliability for another public blockchain. Since 2022 I have freelanced through Toptal on DeFi, DePIN and L1 infrastructure.
In 2021 I started Kurv Tech, where I am building a second brain: software that remembers what you read and acts on it.
- certifiedCKS · CKA · CHFD · RHCE
- spoke atDevConf · Red Hat Summit · Blockchain Connect · PyCon India
- wonCERN Webfest ’13 · Docker Hack Day ×2
- based inBangalore, IST
~/arcolife/work
The trace
My career as a distributed trace: one span per job. Hover to read the time axis; click a span to see its attributes.
-
- org
- CERN openlab
- role
- Summer student
- period
- 2013 → 2013 (3mo)
Built enhancements to the CERN Document Server (CDS).
- Won Webfest ’13 (data visualisation) with a citation-based physicist visualiser
- Part of ProtonMail’s early product brainstorm team
-
- org
- Red Hat
- role
- Performance engineering, R&D
- period
- 2014 → 2018 (4.3y)
- stack
- Python · Ansible · Elasticsearch · Grafana · pbench
Scale benchmarks across OpenShift, OpenStack and RHV.
- Led performance analysis during the Meltdown/Spectre CVEs
- Wrote Sarjitsu, a Linux monitoring and analytics framework
- Co-authored the Satellite 6.2 performance and scale brief
- Presented at Red Hat Summit and DevConf Europe
-
- org
- TrueChain
- role
- R&D consensus lead, head of engineering
- period
- 2018 → 2018 (8mo)
- stack
- BFT · PoW
- link
- arxiv.org/abs/1805.01457
Co-designed and prototyped a hybrid BFT + PoW consensus at ~100× Ethereum’s TPS.
- Filed a USPTO patent (#16/517,479)
- Led a 20-person team of distributed-systems engineers and researchers
-
- org
- Rayd8
- role
- Chief software architect
- period
- 2018 → 2019 (7mo)
- stack
- Python · Flask · GKE · GPU
API-first product for diagnosing diabetic retinopathy from retinal scans.
- Generated K8s configs for GPU inference pipelines
- Trained computer-vision models; ran ML infra on GKE
-
- org
- CasperLabs
- role
- Site reliability engineer
- period
- 2019 → 2020 (1.4y)
- stack
- Terraform · Ansible · Rundeck · Python
Scaled the validator network from 5 to 100+ nodes.
- Defined SLIs/SLOs for multi-region testnets
- Built fault-tolerance testbeds for liveness, safety and throughput
-
- org
- Kurv Tech
- role
- Founder
- period
- 2021 → now (5.8y) · running
- stack
- Go · Python · Rust · TypeScript · k3s
- link
- kurv.tech
Building Kenby, Temmo and Elvs: memory, agents and connectors.
- MoaRAG: multiple R&D prototypes, early revenue
- Backed by AWS Activate and Google for Startups
-
- org
- Toptal
- role
- Freelance DevOps and blockchain engineer
- period
- 2022 → now (4.8y) · running
- stack
- Rust · Go · Kubernetes · Terraform · Grafana · Loki
DeFi, DePIN and L1 infrastructure, from testnets to launches.
- DePIN: rescued an at-risk, seed-funded project and brought its launch forward by six months
- L1: testnet infrastructure for 150+ bare-metal validators and RPC nodes
- DeFi: stopped DDoS attacks with WAFs and rate limits; re-architected across six AWS regions
- DePIN: saved $25k/month with self-hosted observability on EKS
- Wrote the main whitepaper for a new data-availability layer
~/arcolife/selected
Things I have run in production
- 01
Trading infrastructure
Operated a perpetual-futures exchange: a C++ matching and liquidation engine, order and position management, and market data over WebSockets and Redis Streams on multi-region AWS.
- 02
Blockchain networks
Validators and RPC fleets from testnet to launch: 150+ bare-metal nodes on one L1, 5 to 100+ validators at CasperLabs, and a hybrid BFT + PoW consensus at TrueChain.
- 03
DePIN and the edge
A storage network scaled from 2K to 5K nodes, and an edge runtime with atomic blue/green OTA updates and per-node telemetry across 100+ machines.
- 04
Agents and memory
An agentic research pipeline: LangGraph orchestration, Neo4j and Qdrant retrieval, a NATS event bus, and tools sandboxed in Firecracker microVMs.
- 05
Performance engineering
Where it started: scale tests for OpenShift, OpenStack and RHV, KVM block I/O latency analysis, and tooling like Sarjitsu and pbench.
- 06
Cost and reliability
Self-hosted observability that saved $25k a month, WAF and rate-limit defences against DDoS, and zero-trust ingress for production fleets.
~/arcolife/papers, code, talks
On the record
Papers & patents
- TrueChain: Highly Performant Decentralized Public Ledger
- Performance & Scale Tuning of Satellite 6.2 and capsules
- QEMU KVM disk I/O: native or threads?
- User collections and query visualizations (CDS)
Open source
Talks
- From Nakamoto PoW to hybrid consensus
- TrueChain hybrid-consensus prototype
- Analyzing latency of I/O events
- Red Hat Summit
- PyCon India
Wins & certifications
- CERN Webfest
- Docker Global Hack Day
- DoraHacks
- Certified Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS)
- Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
- Certified Hyperledger Fabric Developer (CHFD)
~/arcolife/writing
Braindumps & musings
41 posts since 2011, from two old blogs now under one roof. The rest are on the map.
- GRA FCUK? NAh heXoughts · 2016–2020
- Recovering encrypted LVM based partitions, after accidentally overwriting 'em with 'fio'! heXoughts · 2016–2020
- performance engineering TILs - part 1 heXoughts · 2016–2020
- resizing an xfs partition on a thin provisoned disk in a RHVM env heXoughts · 2016–2020
- never go back, but never forget digital sweat · 2011–2017
- #noteToSelf - fix MariaDB-selinux related errors (fails to restart after update) heXoughts · 2016–2020
~/arcolife/connect