# Nikunj Agarwal

> FDE at Postman | SDE Intern(2x) at Amazon | CS Grad @UIUC | Former SDE-2 at CommerceIQ | BIT Mesra

Location: San Francisco, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/nikunjagarwal

I am a software engineer with 4+ years of experience building scalable backend and distributed systems at high-growth startups and global companies. I recently completed my Master’s in Computer Science from UIUC and hold a B.E. in Computer Science from BIT Mesra.

I am enthusiastic about solving customer problems and building high-quality software products. I have designed and optimized microservices, distributed state machine frameworks, and data-intensive systems handling millions of daily actions. My work focused on performance, reliability, and extensibility, and have led initiatives that significantly reduced system load and improved operational efficiency. Beyond building systems, I enjoy mentoring engineers and teaching, and I value ownership, strong engineering fundamentals, and continuous improvement.

## Work Experience
### Forward Deployed Engineer @ Postman
Jan 2026 – Present | San Francisco, California, United States

### Software Development Engineer Intern @ Amazon
Jan 2025 – Jan 2025 | Seattle, Washington, United States
1. Mitigated retry storms by implementing a centralized retry strategy, reducing API calls per failure from 70+ to 10, lowering system load.
2. Implemented Update Snapshot feature allowing customers to modify configurations, addressing a key pain point for 100k+ customers monthly.
3. Implemented alpha stack for IDDS service, increasing beta reliability and reducing stack onboarding time by 60%, saving developer effort.

### Software Development Engineer - 2 @ CommerceIQ
Jan 2022 – Jan 2024 | Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
1. Implemented code improvements & SQL query optimizations in Snowflake, reducing the product page load time from TP99 of 45 sec to 8 sec
2. Developed batch processor service from scratch to batch entities and make bulk api calls using Spring Boot, AWS and distributed locking; reducing api calls by 99.5% and bringing down throttling from an average daily 20,000 failures to zero
3. Implemented action tracker to track key SLA metrics, achieving 99.99% success actions by pushing 20 million+ daily events to SQS asynchronously from different microservices and inserting them in MongoDB to generate reports using Node.js

### Software Development Engineer - 1 @ CommerceIQ
Jan 2021 – Jan 2022 | Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
1. Developed a distributed state machine framework to create advertising campaigns for Amazon and Walmart based on Saga Transactions by taking sequential actions
2. Upgraded Market Insights dashboard using efficient SQL queries on 100GB+ datasets in Snowflake, reducing page load time by 85% to 3 sec and increasing product adoption by 20%
3. Implemented Wrapper service framework to transform existing asynchronous actions into synchronous framework; reducing latency by 81%
4. Implemented Action Handler microservice in Spring Boot which would read messages from AWS SQS asynchronously and make third party REST API calls to Criteo

### Software Consultant @ getcrux (YC W24)
Jan 2024 – Jan 2024 | Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
1. Leveraged prompt engineering and LLMs while working on different agents to convert user queries into SQL statements
2. Utilized vector embeddings to perform a proof of concept for finding similarities between user queries and historical data, optimizing cache usage and retrieval efficiency.

### Software Engineer Intern @ GEP Worldwide
Jan 2021 – Jan 2021 | Mumbai, Maharashtra, India
1. Migrated automated tests from Java Selenium to Cypress, successfully moving from proof of concept to production code resulting in 35% reduced QA hours, thereby significant cost savings
2. Updated service layer code and migrated queries from SQL to MongoDB in C#, ASP.NET; optimizing API response time by 30%

### Software Development Engineer Intern @ Amazon
Jan 2020 – Jan 2020 | Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
1. Designed a Web Crawler for the documentation team, identifying and removing over 500+ dead links from 10000+ crawled urls to enhance the customer experience
2. Employed Python and MySQL to implement crawler and deployed on AWS Lambda functions to facilitate efficient parallel processing


## Education
### Master's degree in Computer Science
University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

### Bachelor of Technology - BTech in Computer Science
Birla Institute of Technology, Mesra


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nikunj-a-7a4782a2
- Portfolio: https://topmate.io/nikunj_agarwal321

---
Source: https://flows.cv/nikunjagarwal
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/nikunjagarwal/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-11