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Harshith P Raju

Backend Engineer · Distributed Systems

Senior Staff Engineer with 5+ years building Python backends — REST APIs, distributed task pipelines with Celery, Elasticsearch vector search, and AWS infrastructure.

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$ cat about.md

About

I'm a backend engineer with 5+ years building and maintaining Python systems that hold up under real-world scale. My work centers on REST API design, distributed task processing with Celery, full-text and vector search with Elasticsearch, and the AWS + CI/CD infrastructure that keeps it all shipping safely.

Lately I've been integrating LLMs into production — document classification, prompt-management APIs, and analysis workflows with real-time feedback. I care about clean architecture, zero-downtime deployments, and measurable wins (like cutting a task's peak memory by ~80%). When a project needs it, I'm comfortable across the stack with TypeScript, Next.js, and Vue.

$ ls skills/

Skills

Languages

  • Python
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • SQL

Backend

  • Django
  • FastAPI
  • Flask
  • Celery
  • REST APIs

Data & Search

  • Elasticsearch
  • Vector / KNN search
  • PostgreSQL
  • MySQL
  • Apache Airflow

Cloud & DevOps

  • AWS (S3, Lambda, RDS, ECR)
  • AWS Secrets Manager
  • CloudFront
  • Docker
  • GitHub Actions CI/CD

Frontend

  • Next.js
  • Vue.js
  • HTML5
  • CSS3

AI / LLM

  • LLM document classification
  • Prompt-driven workflows

$ ls -la projects/

Projects

gh-codepilot featured

Self-hosted GitHub activity dashboard with an integrated Claude Code terminal

Problem
Tracking PR and issue activity across many repos meant constant context-switching between GitHub tabs, with no single place to review and act on changes.
Approach
Built a self-hosted PWA that polls GitHub via the CLI, surfaces all open PRs/issues with CI and review-status badges, an inline diff viewer, and desktop + browser notifications — then wired in an interactive Claude Code terminal scoped to any PR or issue for AI-assisted review.
Outcome
A single dashboard for cross-repo review with one-click AI sessions and resumable history, installable as a PWA on Linux and macOS.
  • Python
  • Flask
  • JavaScript
  • PWA
  • GitHub CLI
  • Claude Code
Source ↗

Real-Time Polling

Django polling app with live result updates

Problem
Polls need results that update instantly for every participant without manual page refreshes.
Approach
Built a Django application for creating and managing polls, using WebSockets and AJAX to push vote counts to all connected clients in real time, backed by a clean REST endpoint for fetching live results.
Outcome
A responsive polling experience where votes and results update live across all viewers.
  • Python
  • Django
  • WebSockets
  • AJAX
  • JavaScript
Source ↗

More on GitHub ↗.

$ git log --oneline experience

Experience

  1. Senior Staff Engineer · Exlitem

    Dec 2022 — Present

    • Built and maintained the core Django REST API backend for a legal-tech platform, integrating third-party legal data APIs with pagination, throttling, XML processing, and a multi-phase deduplication pipeline.
    • Designed distributed Celery task pipelines with queue separation and batch optimizations that cut peak memory usage by ~80% per task.
    • Integrated Elasticsearch for full-text and structured search, then extended it with dense-vector and KNN search for semantic matching of domain expertise.
    • Built CI/CD and zero-downtime deployment tooling, including Docker multi-stage builds with registry caching and a custom migration-safety check for blue-green compatibility.
    • Applied LLMs for document classification — building prompt-management APIs and document-type detection with real-time WebSocket feedback.

  2. Python Developer · Tertium Technology

    Apr 2021 — Dec 2022

    • Designed and integrated web-scraping pipelines custom-fit to company-specific data requirements.
    • Built an automation tool that batch-processes data across multiple servers for fast, reliable execution.
    • Developed an email-verification tool inspecting MX records and running SMTP tests.

  3. Software Developer (Freelance) · Mind2i

    Freelance

    • Built an end-to-end web platform for student–instructor interactions, course/workshop management, and enrollment via an integrated payment gateway.
    • Integrated the Zoom API for scheduling virtual classes, with AWS Lambda + S3 ingesting and storing Zoom cloud recordings.
    • Configured S3 + CloudFront to serve static/media files and stream past class recordings, with CD via GitHub Actions and docker-compose.

$ ./contact.sh

Get in touch

Open to backend and platform engineering roles, and interesting problems in distributed systems, search, and applied LLMs. The fastest way to reach me is email.

Email

hraju115@gmail.com

GitHub

github.com/hraju115

LinkedIn

in/harshith-raju

Résumé

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