Pawan Panjwani — Software Engineer

I build scalable infrastructure platforms that power high-throughput, mission-critical products.I'm a Backend engineer focused on building infrastructure platforms that scale under real-world pressure, whether it’s rate limiting at hyperscale, schema governance across hundreds of services, or improving reliability on latency-sensitive execution paths.At LinkedIn, I currently lead the core initiatives around distributed rate limiting and throttling spanning stateless APIs, stateful services, and emerging AI workloads, enforcing fairness, isolation, and resource guarantees across systems with wildly different access patterns.I lead the effort of onboarding protobuf schemas LinkedIn’s Unified Schema Registry (USR), a platform designed to enforce end-to-end schema validation across the company’s diverse data ecosystem spanning Kafka pipelines, gRPC and Rest.li APIs, Espresso and Venice stores, and offline analytics jobs. USR ensures schema shifts are detected early, before production deployment, drastically reducing runtime errors and costly rollbacks.I also worked on large-scale experimentation infrastructure, building Service Performance Insights to process terabytes of A/B test data, apply statistical significance models (p-value, confidence intervals), and surface insights for the stakeholders to evaluate the ramp strategy and impact on the service performance

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Backend Engineer specializing in scalable infrastructure and distributed systems.

Location: Mumbai, Maharashtra, India

Experience: 8 yrs 1 mo

Skills

Distributed Systems
Api Management
Schema Validation
Distributed Architecture
A/b Testing
Statistical Analysis
Backend Engineering
Curriculum Development
Mentorship
Microservices
Cypress
Kafka
Redis
Workflow Automation
Node.js

Career Highlights

Expert in building scalable infrastructure platforms.
Led core initiatives for distributed rate limiting at LinkedIn.
Designed curriculum for backend engineering education.

Work Experience

Staff Software Engineer (1 yr 2 mos)

Senior Software Engineer (2 yrs 1 mo)

Software Engineer (1 yr 5 mos)

Kalvium

Consultant – Program Management (Curriculum Development) (1 yr 4 mos)

Airtribe

Engineering Instructor (4 yrs 5 mos)

BrowserStack

Senior Software Engineer (6 mos)

Software Engineer (1 yr 2 mos)

Newton School

Engineering Mentor (3 yrs 6 mos)

Cimpress

Software Development Engineer (1 yr 6 mos)

Bharti Airtel limitied Gurgaon

Internship (3 mos)

Education

Bachelor of Technology at Veermata Jijabai Technological Institute (VJTI)

Hsc at Birla College of Arts Science & Commerce Birla College Road Kalyan Dist Thane 421 304

Pawan Panjwani

Software Engineer

Mumbai, Maharashtra, India8 yrs 1 mo experience

Most Likely To SwitchHighly Stable

Key Highlights

Expert in building scalable infrastructure platforms.
Led core initiatives for distributed rate limiting at LinkedIn.
Designed curriculum for backend engineering education.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Backend Engineer specializing in scalable infrastructure and distributed systems.

Contact

ppanjwani@linkedin.com +919702846685 LinkedIn

Skills

Core Skills

Distributed SystemsApi ManagementSchema ValidationDistributed ArchitectureA/b TestingStatistical AnalysisBackend EngineeringCurriculum DevelopmentMentorshipMicroservicesCypressKafkaRedisWorkflow AutomationNode.js

Other Skills

.NET Core.NET FrameworkAWSAWS Elastic BeanstalkAlgorithmsAmazon EC2Amazon Web Services (AWS)Android DevelopmentBashC#C++CI/CDCareer GuidanceCoding SessionsConvolutional Neural Networks (CNN)

About

Experience

8 yrs 1 mo

Total Experience

2 yrs

Average Tenure

4 yrs 8 mos

Current Experience

3 roles

Staff Software Engineer

Promoted

Apr 2025 – Present · 1 yr 2 mos

Leading the strategy, vision, and execution for LinkedIn’s distributed rate limiting and traffic shaping platform (Liminal), enabling fairness, isolation, and predictable performance across stateless APIs, stateful systems, and emerging AI workloads.
Building quota enforcement and adaptive throttling frameworks that prevent noisy-neighbor issues in stateful systems, ensuring fair resource distribution and stability under heterogeneous load patterns.
Driving cross-functional alignment across infrastructure, and product teams to ensure site stability and predicable performance
Defining the long-term architecture and roadmap for Liminal, focusing on multi-tenant fairness, observability, right sizing to support high throughput systems

Distributed SystemsRate LimitingTraffic ShapingAPI Management

Senior Software Engineer

Promoted

Mar 2023 – Apr 2025 · 2 yrs 1 mo

Led the onboarding of Protobuf schemas to LinkedIn’s Unified Schema Registry (USR), a platform enforcing end-to-end schema validation across Kafka pipelines, gRPC/Rest.li APIs, Espresso & Venice stores, and offline analytics workflows.
Designed and implemented the distributed architecture powering USR’s CI/CD integrations, spanning Gradle and Protoc plugins, to perform shift-left schema validations and catch incompatible changes before production deployment.
Defined protobuf descriptor–based validation rules and built the data storage and versioning layer for schema lifecycle management, ensuring consistency and backward compatibility across thousands of producers and consumers.
Engineered disaster recovery and backup orchestration for TiDB distributed databases, implementing temporal workflow based backup pipelines and Kafka-driven replay mechanisms to enable low-impact, periodic recovery while maintaining live traffic stability

ProtobufSchema ValidationCI/CDDistributed Architecture

Software Engineer

Oct 2021 – Mar 2023 · 1 yr 5 mos

Lead the design and development of a A/B testing performance analysis infrastructure to quantify service-level API impacts and detect regressions caused by live A/B experiment traffic, leveraging high-throughput event streams and statistical metrics (latency, error rate, payload size)
Enhancing site infrastructure stability and availability by enabling per-API impact visibility instead of relying solely on member-level metrics, improving guardrails for SiteUp and performance regression prevention.
Scaling event ingestion and mapping pipelines to process 2M–7.5M Lix events per minute, using normalization, streaming computation, and incremental aggregation.
Developed signal pipelines capturing API & page-level Lix impact (latency, error rate, payload size) across 10TB+ datasets daily
Engineered signal pipelines for API and page-level Lix impacts across 10TB+ daily datasets, computing percentile latency distributions with T-digest sketches, unique member counts with Theta sketches, and statistical significance (z-score, p-value) for robust regression detection and experiment evaluation.
Implemented server-side Lix performance notifications and reporting infrastructure, delivering timely alerts on service/API-level regressions to drive proactive mitigation and improve overall system reliability.

A/B TestingStatistical AnalysisEvent ProcessingSignal Pipelines

Kalvium

Consultant – Program Management (Curriculum Development)

Apr 2022 – Aug 2023 · 1 yr 4 mos

Designed and developed industry-aligned curricula for engineering students, covering Open Source Development, DBMS, Object-Oriented Programming, and Design Patterns, ensuring every topic connected to real-world engineering practices.
Conducted live workshops and coding sessions across multiple cohorts, helping students translate theoretical concepts into hands-on project implementations.
Collaborated with academic and technical teams to refine and structure learning modules, integrating project-based assessments and feedback loops for measurable learner outcomes.
This stint helped me in gaining deep insights into curriculum design, structured learning, and learner engagement at scale.

Curriculum DevelopmentWorkshopsCoding Sessions

Airtribe

Engineering Instructor

Jan 2022 – Present · 4 yrs 5 mos

Trained 200+ learners across 14 intensive cohorts with an average instructor rating of 4.7+/5, consistently driving high completion and placement outcomes. Led end-to-end ownership of Backend Engineering curriculum delivery, covering everything from fundamentals to production-grade systems.
Designed learner-centric, real-world-first curriculum, ensuring every concept mapped to a practical engineering use case, not theory for the sake of theory.
Delivered live sessions, actively reported learner progress trends and suggested continuous improvements to Airtribe’s core pedagogy model.
Consistently assisted learners beyond classroom boundaries - via 1:1 mentorship, career direction pointers, and system design thinking workshops.
Domains Covered:
Core Backend & Java Foundations: Java Fundamentals, JVM Internals, OOP, Design Principles (SOLID), Design Patterns, Multithreading & Concurrency, Asynchronous Programming.
Frameworks & System Architecture: Spring, Spring Boot, REST API Fundamentals & Modelling, ORM & Persistence (JPA/Hibernate), Caching, Streaming Systems, Unit & Integration Testing, Authentication & Authorization, OAuth 2.0
Database & System Design: Relational Modelling, Normalization, Indexing, Database Internals, High-Level & Low-Level System Design, Scalability, Availability & Fault Tolerance
Advanced System Design - Scalability (Load Balancing, Sharding, Partitioning), Availability & Fault Tolerance (Replication, Failover, Circuit Breakers), Consistency & Coordination (CAP, Consensus, Eventual Consistency), High-Throughput Patterns (CQRS, Event Sourcing, Idempotency), and Operational Excellence (Observability, Backpressure, Retry & Degradation Strategies) and lot more

Backend EngineeringCurriculum DevelopmentMentorship

Browserstack

2 roles

Senior Software Engineer

Promoted

Apr 2021 – Oct 2021 · 6 mos

Implemented a scalable parallelization layer for Cypress by orchestrating spec distribution across mobile and web terminal infrastructures, backed by ElasticSearch result collation, resulting in 10× faster builds for high-throughput CI workflows and test automation framework
Built a circuit breaker framework for microservices to monolith communication using Node.js + Redis pub/sub, enabling automated state transitions, real-time health monitoring, and driving a 30% drop in system error rates.
Replaced exponential backoff polling with an event-driven session orchestration model, cutting P90 queue latency by 20% and improving concurrency efficiency for high QPS paths
Optimized the mobile automation stack by reducing iOS session boot times by 30×, removing key bottlenecks in device startup flows.
Led infra modernization by migrating AWS + on-prem workloads from CentOS 6, CentOS 7, improving CIAQ scores and long-term maintainability.
Node.js, Redis, Kafka, Elasticsearch, AWS, Kubernetes, Terraform, Ansible, Nagios, InfluxDB, Grafana, Nginx, Bash, CI/CD, ELK, Cypress, Selenium, Appium, MySQL

CypressMicroservicesNode.jsRedis

Software Engineer

Feb 2020 – Apr 2021 · 1 yr 2 mos

Identified SPOFs across the Automate ecosystem and introduced redundancy and fallback mechanisms, elevating platform reliability from 99.75% → 99.99%.
Performed zero-downtime rolling upgrades of Kafka, Redis, and Elasticsearch in production, mitigating upgrade risk across globally distributed environments.
Designed granular observability via Nagios, InfluxDB, Grafana, shipping metric-based alerting across infra, queueing, and execution services.
Owned uptime, SLA compliance, and RCA workflows for Automate; standardized mitigation playbooks and reduced mean time to recovery through automation.
Automated failure-handling runbooks and BAU processes, cutting manual toil and incident recovery overhead.

KafkaRedisNagiosGrafana

Newton school

Engineering Mentor

Jan 2020 – Jul 2023 · 3 yrs 6 mos · Mumbai · Remote

Delivered live sessions on Node.js, backend fundamentals, HTML and CSS to aspiring developers
Mentored students on assignments, problem-solving, and career guidance
Helped learners navigate industry challenges and become job-ready
This experience offered firsthand insight into the challenges faced by early-career engineers and strengthened my ability to teach, guide, and give back to the developer community.

MentorshipLive SessionsCareer Guidance

Cimpress

Software Development Engineer

Jul 2018 – Jan 2020 · 1 yr 6 mos · Mumbai Metropolitan Region · On-site

Software Engineer - Cimpress (Mass Customization & Order Fulfillment Platform)
Bootstrapped the engineering team in India and led 3 developers to build workflow and automation tools for Cimpress mass customization & order lifecycle platform.
Designed and developed a full-stack review and approval workflow system to allow graphic agents to verify customer orders before print processing, reducing order rejections & support escalations.
Built real-time reporting dashboards (Node.js + React.js + AWS) to track agent productivity, order delays, SLA breaches, and exception handling, enabling data-driven operational insights.
Implemented priority-based scheduling logic for time-sensitive orders (overnight / express handling), optimizing throughput for thousands of concurrent fulfilment requests.
Developed a multi-threaded load simulation engine to stress-test backend services at scale, benchmarking CPU/memory consumption and concurrency performance.
Created logo scraping and positioning microservices (Node.js + AWS S3) to extract brand assets and auto-align text/image placement for printing workflows.
Managed cross-functional delivery, collaborating with UX, operations, and stakeholders to translate business rules into scalable automation systems.
Tech Stack:
Node.js, React.js, AWS (Lambda, S3, Elastic beanstalk, EC2, ECS), C# (.NET), MySQL, Redis, Distributed Workflow Systems, Multithreading, Event-Driven Jobs

Workflow AutomationNode.jsReact.jsAWS

Bharti airtel limitied gurgaon

Internship

May 2017 – Aug 2017 · 3 mos · Gurugram

Built an Excel-based automation system using VBA + C++ to digitize and streamline Ericsson Media Gateway -inventory management, eliminating manual data entry and reducing processing time.
Developed an automated Detail Level Design (DLD) generator for Alcatel router configurations using VBA and C++, cutting turnaround time for network design teams and improving consistency.
Tech Stack: VBA, C++, Excel Automation, Telecom Infra (Ericsson MGW, Alcatel Routers)

VBAC++Excel Automation