Navnit (Padmanavaneethan) — Software Engineer & System Designer
Software engineer and system designer. I work at the intersection of backend engineering, AI workflows, product thinking, and communication — and my job, in every one of those, is the same: turn messy problems into working systems.
This page is a playable portfolio — enable JavaScript to build it one block at a time. The full content is below.
System Design & Backend Architecture
Deep experience designing reporting architecture and scalable backends: Temporal-based orchestration, GraphQL APIs, S3-based workflows, CockroachDB/Postgres patterns, and YAML-driven frameworks that other teams build on instead of around. Good systems reduce future friction and are designed for the next team.
Reporting & Insight Pipelines
Built reporting frameworks and insight pipelines — NetPulse among them — that process large KPI volumes without falling over: streaming over loading, S3-based persistence, checkpointed jobs, and memory-conscious PDF and report generation. Scalability is not magic; it is disciplined flow.
AI & Agentic Automation
I build structured agentic workflows instead of vibes: phased flows like triage → bug filing → codefix → review → verify, Copilot plugin experiments, Jira/Humio/Bitbucket automation, evidence collection, and tribal-knowledge capture so agents stop rediscovering the same facts. AI becomes an engineering accelerator when the workflow is disciplined.
Product Thinking
Product thinking beyond the codebase. The best ideas start from a human being stuck, not a feature list. I find the sharpest user pain, ship the smallest thing that solves it, and build MVPs to test that belief. A product is not a feature list — it is a solved pain.
Communication & Technical Writing
Proposals, presentations, internal idea submissions, and technical writing shaped for the audience in front of me — from deep-dive docs for engineers to one-sharp-message decks for leadership. Complex thing in, clear thing out. Clear communication turns ideas into movement.
Open Source — Gapless
Gapless is a free, open-source macOS app I designed and built — the visual interface for auto-editor. It finds the silence in a video (thinking pauses, dead air, waiting on a progress bar) and proposes every cut on a visual timeline, so you review them, keep the ones you want, and export a tighter MP4. Fully local, no account, GPL-3.0. A whole product shipped end to end: the editing engine bundled in, an architecture-aware download flow, and a landing page.
Contact
I build by solving. I solve by thinking clearly. And I turn messy problems into working systems. If you're building something that needs that — send a signal. Reach me on LinkedIn, or play the interactive portfolio for a direct line.