Archit Sharma

Principal Engineer · Infra & Blockchain Systems Operator · Bangalore, India Building resilient, distributed systems that ship fast and scale clean.
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Summary

Archit is a Senior Principal Engineer with 12+ years architecting and operating high-performance distributed systems across bare-metal and multi-region cloud environments. He works at the intersection of Infrastructure (DevOps, SRE, LLM/ML-Ops) and Blockchain (DeFi, DePIN, L1/L2), scaling production networks from research and testnets to full launches while driving measurable gains in reliability, cost efficiency, and latency. With roots in cloud-scale performance engineering, he has built and managed globally distributed validator and RPC infrastructure, led architectural overhauls during high-growth phases, implemented zero-trust and infrastructure-as-code practices, and strengthened observability and security for mission-critical systems. He actively codes full-stack across backend, protocol, and infrastructure layers, has authored whitepapers and contributed to patented research, and advises startups as a product architect and fractional CTO, leading teams from zero to scale.

Kurv Tech — Founder / Principal Engineer · 2021 → Present

MoaRAG — visual knowledge OS to organize ideas and workflows. Iterated through multiple R&D prototypes to validate product-market fit. Early revenue; backed by AWS Activate & Google for Startups. View Demo →

Toptal — Freelance DevOps & Blockchain Engineer · 2022 → Present

  • DeFi (Lead DevOps): Led validator/RPC ops for on-chain order flows (DEX, LST, MEV). Deployed self-hosted baremetal infra & observability (Rust, Go, Python).
  • DePIN (CTO/Product Manager): Rescued an 18-month at-risk, million-dollar seed-funded project, accelerating launch by 6 months. Led a dual-track strategy (2K-node storage platform scaling to 5K; 70% cost-reduction DePIN aggregator) by breaking delivery into multiple project streams. Hired PMs, drove budgets, and negotiated ~$350K in immediate-delivery vendor contracts.
  • L2/L3 Storage Layer (Technical Writer): Authored the main whitepaper for a new data availability layer, translating complex Web2/Web3 concepts for technical and broad audiences.
  • Data Platform (Grafana Plugin Dev): Developed Grafana plugins for a US defense-industry data startup. Built time-series visualizations & API integrations for data downsampling.
  • L1 Blockchain (Sr. DevOps): Built testnet infra for 150+ baremetal nodes (validators, RPCs). Deployed full-stack observability on EKS (Loki, Grafana, Vector) and secured ingress (HAProxy, Zero-Trust).
  • DeFi (Infra Lead): Halted DDoS attacks with WAFs/rate-limits. Re-architected scalable infra across 6 AWS regions and built intent-based solvers (Go, gRPC) for low-latency DEX trades.
  • DePIN (DevOps Lead): Led infra for multi-million valued token airdrops and the block rewards product. Saved $25k/mo via self-hosted observability on EKS, ArgoCD tuning, and multi-cloud migration.
  • Art Provenance (Blockchain Dev): Delivered production-grade Hyperledger Fabric on K8s (Terraform, GH Actions). Developed TypeScript smart contracts and CRD-based lifecycle automation for NFT use-cases.
  • AI/LLM Infra: Built FastAPI-based RAG pipelines (Langchain, vLLM) for real-time knowledge retrieval and deployed ML inference on Ray GPU clusters (GKE, Kueue) for financial use-cases.

CasperLabs — Site Reliability Engineer · 2019 – 2020

Scaled validator network from 5 to 100+ nodes. Led SRE for multi-region testnets, defined SLIs/SLOs, and automated infra (Terraform, Ansible). Built Python/Rundeck testbeds for fault tolerance (liveness, safety, throughput).

Rayd8 — Chief Software Architect · 2018 – 2019

Shipped an API-first healthcare product for diagnosis of diabetic retinopathy via computer vision. Developed Python Flask APIs and scaffolding to auto-generate K8s configs for GPU inference pipelines. Deployed ML infra on GKE and trained CV models on retinal scans.

TrueChain — R&D Consensus Lead, Head of Engineering · 2018

Co-authored and prototyped a high-TPS hybrid consensus (BFT + PoW), achieving ~100x Ethereum TPS. Filed USPTO patent. Led 20-person team of distributed systems developers and researchers (MIT, NYU, UC Berkeley).

Red Hat — Performance Engineering, R&D · 2014 – 2018

Delivered scale benchmarks across OpenShift, OpenStack, & RHV. Led performance analysis during Meltdown/Spectre CVEs. Authored `Sarjitsu`, a Linux monitoring/analytics framework. Presented at Red Hat Summit & DevConf Europe.

CERN — Openlab Summer Student · 2013

Built enhancements to CERN Document Server (CDS). Won Webfest '13 (Data Viz) for a citation-based physicist visualizer. Part of Protonmail's early product brainstorm team.

Publications & Patents

Certifications

  • • Kubernetes Security Specialist (CKS)
  • • Kubernetes Administrator (CKA)
  • • Hyperledger Fabric Developer (CHFD)
  • • Red Hat Engineer & Administrator (RHCE & RHCSA)

Education

  • B.Tech, Computer Science — Amity University
  • Minor in Communication Skills, French and Behavioral Science.

Talks & Recognition

DevConf ’16 (KVM Block I/O) Blockchain Connect ’18 (San Jose) Starfish Mission ’18 (San Francisco) KubeCon ’21 (CNCF BugBash Top 3) Docker Hackathon (State Winner) CERN Webfest ’13 (Data Viz Winner) DoraHacks (Runner up)