Hi, my name is

Sai Sushanth.

I build things that don't go down at 3am.

Backend engineer at Amazon building distributed systems and high-throughput services. I care about clean APIs, observable systems, and writing code that the next person can actually understand. Available for select freelance projects.

See my workGet in touch

01.About Me

I'm a backend engineer who genuinely enjoys thinking about how systems fail. Not in a pessimistic way — more like, if I can imagine every way something breaks, I can build it so it doesn't. That's been my job at Amazon for the past 4+ years.

My day-to-day involves building distributed services that handle millions of requests, designing APIs that other teams actually want to use, and occasionally staring at CloudWatch dashboards wondering why latency spiked at 2am.

Outside of work, I build things to scratch my own itch. GoKV started because I wanted to understand how Redis actually works under the hood. ContractLens came from watching a friend spend hours reading through lease agreements.

I'm also available for freelance work — particularly backend architecture, API design, and system design consulting. If you have a project that needs to scale reliably, let's talk.

Technologies I work with regularly:

  • ▷ Java
  • ▷ Go
  • ▷ Python
  • ▷ AWS
  • ▷ Distributed Systems
  • ▷ System Design
Sai Sushanth Thakkalapally

02.Things I've Built

Featured Project

GoKV

Built to understand how databases work under the hood. Handles 10K+ concurrent connections with Go's goroutine model. Implements LRU eviction, snapshotting to disk, and a CLI client.

  • Go
  • TCP
  • Concurrency
  • System Design

GoKV

Screenshot or demo preview

Featured Project

ContractLens

Uses LLM-based extraction with custom prompts for legal domain. Built a React frontend with a Python FastAPI backend. Handles PDF parsing, clause classification, and risk scoring.

  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • React
  • LLMs
  • PDF Parsing

ContractLens

Screenshot or demo preview

03.Where I've Worked

Software Development Engineer II @ Amazon

2024 – Present

Building distributed backend services handling millions of requests. Working on system design, API development, and cross-team infrastructure.

Software Development Engineer I @ Amazon

2022 – 2024

Developed and maintained backend services. Built internal tools for team productivity. Contributed to on-call operations and incident response.

Software Development Engineer Intern @ Amazon

2022

Built a proof-of-concept service during a 6-month internship that was later adopted by the team.

04. What's Next?

Get In Touch

I'm currently open to new full-time opportunities and select freelance projects. Whether you're a recruiter with an exciting role, a startup that needs backend expertise, or someone with an interesting problem to solve — my inbox is always open.

Say Hello