About Rajiv

Selected Architecture Problems I Write About

• Database Reliability: Connection storms, autovacuum starvation, replication lag, and mitigating cascading failures in heavily loaded transactional systems.
• AI Engineering Guardrails: Evals, token-efficient tool use, bounding agent autonomy, and safely integrating LLMs with core database environments.
• Cloud & Platform Architecture: Multi-region deployments, cost optimization, progressive delivery control planes, and GitOps workflows.
• System Design: Consistency models, backpressure, idempotency, event-driven architecture, and scaling beyond single-node bottlenecks.

My Operating Principles

• Start with the failure mode: Real architecture is defined by what happens when it breaks, not how it works on the whiteboard.
• Avoid vendor magic: I prefer open-source engines and explicit configurations over black-box managed abstractions where you can't see the query plan.
• Documentation is an artifact, not an afterthought: Runbooks, architecture decision records, and operational checklists are part of the system's runtime state.
• Metrics beat intuition: You don't know the system is slow until you can measure the saturation and the burn rate.

Representative Systems (Anonymized)

I have designed and recovered production systems across financial services, global technology, and SaaS platforms, including:

• High-throughput multi-region payment routing systems where RTO and RPO are measured in seconds.
• Zero-downtime migrations of thousands of legacy relational schemas into consolidated Postgres/Aurora clusters.
• Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines serving strict compliance and audit controls.
• Internal Developer Platforms orchestrating CI/CD and infrastructure-as-code for hundreds of engineering teams.

What I Do Not Write About

To keep the signal-to-noise ratio high, you will not find the following on this site:

• Product marketing masquerading as tutorials.
• High-level thought leadership without operational blueprints.
• "Hello World" examples or basic introductory API docs.
• Theoretical architectures that have not been battle-tested in production.

Best Posts to Understand My Thinking

If you're new here, start with these foundational pieces:

• The Start Here Guide
• Database Reliability Playbook
• AI Engineering Operating Model

Speaking, Consulting & Collaboration

I occasionally take on advisory roles, architecture reviews, and consulting engagements for teams facing complex database scaling or AI integration challenges.

For inquiries, please reach out directly: contact@rajivonai.com