# Akshat Mahajan

> I build @ Cloudflare

Location: Cambridge, Massachusetts, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/akshatmahajan

Distributed systems engineer with SRE experience, helping build a better Internet working on Cloudflare's data plane.

## Work Experience
### Software Engineer - Privacy Edge @ Cloudflare
Jan 2024 – Present | Boston, Massachusetts, United States
I shipped Web Bot Auth in one month: https://developers.cloudflare.com/bots/concepts/bot/verified-bots/web-bot-auth/

Web Bot Auth makes it possible for Cloudflare to charge AI crawlers for access to your website with confidence.

I wrote + open-sourced a Rust library for anyone to implement it themselves. It not only implements web bot authentication - it also implements RFC 9421 from scratch, so you can use it as "just" an HTTP message signatures library.

I built all of that logic into our edge network to verify a request automatically.

I single-handedly stood up all of the core infrastructure needed to register a new AI crawler as a verified bot: Kubernetes, Postgres, a new APi in Golang that other teams can call into.

### Software Engineer, Argo Smart Routing @ Cloudflare
Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | Boston, Massachusetts, United States
I made a fleet of UDP / TCP / IP network proxies in Rust serving >500k requests per second faster and more reliable.

• Improved proxy performance by 10,000x (90 ms → 8 μs) by profiling
and designing in-memory caches populated out-of-band on the critical path

• Removed multiple single points of failure: built at-scale key rotation for Wire-
guard tunnels, and designed + delivered a highly-available analytics pipeline

• Added out-of-application performance bottleneck observability through use of
socket ancillary data and eBPF-based packet loss detection in the kernel

### Software Engineer Intern @ Cloudflare
Jan 2021 – Jan 2021
Built an A/B testing framework for Orpheus (see link below); implemented multiple novel global
route computation algorithms before product went generally available

### DevOps/Site Reliability Engineer @ Autodesk
Jan 2019 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area
• Developed and operated self-hosted Kubernetes clusters; managed networking,
routing and platform reliability for over 100+ services across multiple regions

• Built infrastructure-as-a-service with Salt, Cloudformation and Terraform;
undertook VPC design and Postgres load balancing for new Australia datacenter

• Automation tooling development with Python, Docker, bash e.g. network circuit
breakers, DNS failover with healthchecks, diff generation for production changes.

### DevOps/Site Reliability Engineer @ PlanGrid
Jan 2017 – Jan 2019 | San Francisco Bay Area
Same responsibilities as at Autodesk.

PlanGrid was acquired by Autodesk in February 2019.

### Software Engineer @ BrightEdge
Jan 2016 – Jan 2017 | San Francisco Bay Area
• Sole maintainer of distributed data ingestion pipeline on HDFS/Hbase; generated individual SEO recommendations for 30-40 million URLs weekly.

• Improved monitoring tooling latency by 96% after implementing priority queueing that “remembers” slow queries and diverts them to specialised channels.

• Quintupled network throughput (200 MB/s → 1 GB/s) by implementing Thrift
serialization for Python code talking to Hbase over fixed bandwidth cables.

### Intern - Data Semantics and Engineering @ DataWeave Software Pvt. Ltd.
Jan 2015 – Jan 2015 | Bengaluru Area, India
• Natural language processing over millions of short texts at a B2B corporation
delivering business insights from public web-scale data.

### Student Investigator, Planetary Data Systems @ NASA
Jan 2013 – Jan 2015 | UCLA
Used Python libraries numpy, scipy, matplotlib, as well as MATLAB, to model the evolution of tropical relative humidity over 25,000 years.


## Education
### Master's degree in Computer Science
Brown University

### Bachelor of Science (BS) in Physics
UCLA


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/mahajanakshat
- Portfolio: https://akshatmahajan.com/
- Portfolio: https://akshatmahajan.com/blog

---
Source: https://flows.cv/akshatmahajan
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/akshatmahajan/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-03-28