Sylesh Kona — Backend Engineer · Distributed Systems

— 01 / About

Pipelines that scale.
Systems that survive.

I think in services, contracts, and concurrency primitives — and I write code that has to behave under pressure.

I'm a backend engineer who just graduated with an MS in Computer Science from SUNY Albany (GPA 3.75, May 2026). The summer before that was spent at Rivian Automotive's Data Applications & ML team in Palo Alto, where I built Go microservices for vehicle telemetry pipelines, automated CI/CD documentation, and provisioned services with Terraform.

The work I love sits at the seam of systems and data — RESTful APIs that need to be boring and reliable, vector stores that need to be fast and right, and observability that turns 3am pages into solved tickets.

Outside of work I built OpsPilot, an enterprise AI incident-triage agent with FastAPI, Astra DB vector search, and MCP tools — and a blockchain supply-chain system covering 120+ distribution points.

about.go

// who I am, in 14 lines
package sylesh

type Engineer struct {
    Name    string
    Stack   []string
    Loves   []string
}

var Sylesh = Engineer{
    Name:  "Venkata Sylesh Kona",
    Stack: []string{"Go", "Python", "k8s", "AWS"},
    Loves: []string{"clean APIs", "low latency",
              "good observability"},
}

func (e *Engineer) Status() string {
    return "shipping & learning" // always
}

— 02 / Selected Work

Three services
I'm proud of.

Each project is a system, not a screenshot. Below: the architecture, the metrics, and what I learned shipping it.

Service · #001prod-ready

OpsPilot

// enterprise AI incident-triage agent

Embeds engineer-reported incidents, performs vector search over a 1536-dim cosine similarity collection in Astra DB to retrieve runbooks, and routes context to a Langflow agent equipped with MCP tools for live Cassandra read/write. Deterministic JSON output via system prompt constraints; deployed via Docker Compose with Nginx, TLS, rate limiting, and OpenAI fallback.

FastAPIAstra DBLangflowOpenAIMCPDocker ComposeNginx

Vector dim1536

Chunk size1000ch

StackRAG + MCP

Service · #002deployed

VMCAP Pipelines

// vehicle telemetry @ Rivian

High-throughput backend microservices in Go for vehicle telemetry data pipelines. Improved data throughput by 30% and reduced end-to-end processing latency by 25% through optimized concurrency patterns. Maintained REST APIs supporting secure inter-service communication across 4 departments. Authored 25+ Cypress UI tests for Polaris UI, raising coverage from 35% → 85% in two sprints.

GoPythonPostgreSQLMongoDBCypressTerraformSimdash

Throughput+30%

Latency−25%

Coverage35→85%

Service · #003on-chain

Seed Supply Chain

// blockchain provenance system

Solidity + Rust seed-distribution smart-contract system reducing supply-chain fraud by 40% and improving transparency by 50%. Deployed across 3 states and 120+ distribution points via QR-linked on-chain validation.

SolidityRustSmart ContractsQR / dApp

Fraud ↓40%

Reach120+ pts

Service · #00499.9% SLA

E-Commerce Platform

// scalable web store, k8s-native

React + Node.js storefront for 1,000+ SKUs with JWT auth and AWS-based payments. Deployed via Docker and Kubernetes with CI/CD pipelines maintaining 99.9% uptime over 3 months.

ReactNode.jsAWSDockerKubernetesJWT

Uptime99.9%

SKUs1k+

— 03 / Stack

My service mesh.

A working snapshot of what I reach for first. Languages on the left, ops on the right, AI in between.

Languages

Goprimary
Pythonprimary
TypeScriptfluent
Rustworking
C++ / Solidityworking

Cloud / DevOps

AWS (Lambda, S3, EC2)★★★★
Docker★★★★★
Kubernetes★★★★
Terraform★★★
CI/CD · Git★★★★★

Data Layer

PostgreSQL★★★★
MongoDB★★★★
Astra DB / Cassandra★★★
Redis★★★
MySQL★★★

AI / Frameworks

FastAPI · Express★★★★
RAG · Embeddings★★★★
OpenAI API★★★★
MCP · Langflow★★★★
gRPC · Swagger★★★

— 04 / Timeline

Where I've shipped.

Five years of building things that other people had to depend on.

2026 · Jan – May

Graduate Teaching Assistant

University at Albany, SUNY

CSI 409 — Formal Methods and Models · CSI 416/516 — Computer Communication Networks
Graded 50+ undergrad/grad students; gave feedback on algorithmic modeling, verification, networking.
Maintained grading consistency across multiple sections in collaboration with faculty.

2025 · May – Aug · Palo Alto, CA

Software Engineering Intern · Data Applications & ML

Rivian Automotive

Engineered Go microservices for VMCAP vehicle telemetry pipelines: +30% throughput, −25% latency.
Built REST APIs in Go and Python supporting inter-service communication across 4 departments.
Authored 25+ Cypress UI tests for Polaris UI, raising coverage from 35% → 85% in 2 sprints.
Automated Swagger doc generation via CI/CD — −70% maintenance, +40% onboarding speed.
Provisioned 3+ services with Simdash + Terraform, cutting deploy setup time by 50%.

2024 · Aug – 2026 · May · Albany, NY

M.S. Computer Science · GPA 3.75 · Graduated

University at Albany, SUNY

Coursework: Distributed Systems, Machine Learning, Cloud Computing, Blockchain, Software Engineering, Algorithms.

2023 · Jun – Aug · India

Research Intern

GITAM Deemed University

Designed an experimental protocol for N-dimensional smart contracts in Blockchain 5.0.
Co-authored statistical analyses contributing to research on next-gen blockchain applications.

2023 · May – Jul · India

Software Development Intern

Frux Software Solutions

Built a Node.js + React pharmacy tracking platform — −40% manual handling time.
Containerized with Docker, deployed to AWS EC2 at 99% availability; modeled data in MongoDB.

— 05 / Contact

Open to backend &
platform roles.

Reach me on any channel below — I reply quickly and ship even quicker.

sylesh@portfolio ~ % availability --check

› full-time · backend / platform / ML-infra · available now

› preference: Go or Python at scale · remote-first OK

› visa: F-1 STEM OPT (3 yrs) — no sponsorship needed

sylesh@portfolio ~ % say hi

email
konavenkatasylesh@gmail.com → linkedin
/in/sylesh-kona → github
/sylesh29 → phone
+1 (518) 977-9740 →

Pipelines that scale.Systems that survive.

Three servicesI'm proud of.