Hello, I'm Mayank Raj. I build infrastructure, security, and data systems that are expected to keep their composure when production starts throwing furniture. I also play the violin, trek whenever the mountains allow it, and occasionally convince drones to behave. Mostly.

By day, I'm a Staff Engineer at Stripe on the Core Infra team. That means I spend a lot of time thinking about the boring-looking foundations that quietly decide whether everything above them feels fast, safe, and reliable. The glamorous part is architecture. The honest part is making sure the floor does not wobble.

Before Stripe, my work moved across security, cryptography, big data, AI systems, and cloud platforms. Different rooms, same obsession: make the complex thing understandable enough that teams can operate it without needing a campfire story and three tribal elders.

• At Salesforce, I worked on security and cryptography for large-scale enterprise systems, including benchmarking, caching, and reliability work that improved throughput while cutting cost. Very glamorous if your idea of glamour includes threat models and suspicious latency graphs.
• At Cactus Labs, I led a 15+ engineer team building big data and machine learning systems. We built a data platform that handled 1.5TB of data per week and turned it into decisions people could actually use, which is the part the architecture diagrams often forget.
• As the founder of Apptale.io, I created a monitoring service that watched systems across all 51 AWS availability zones at roughly 1/15th the cost of comparable tools. Infrastructure tends to whisper before it screams. Apptale was built to hear the whisper.
• I've also contributed to open-source projects like FireFox. Yes, that browser you might be using right now. Tiny fingerprints, but fingerprints nonetheless.

When I'm not deep in the machinery, you might find me scaling mountains, coaxing melodies from my violin, or tinkering with drones. The through-line is the same: systems are easier to understand when you respect both the theory and the messy physical world they live in.