Shishir Khandelwal

Staff Engineer at PhysicsWallah

India

About

Here’s my resume (last updated Feb 2026): https://drive.google.com/file/d/18OwawEaARDrCnRQEoCySOqu6vT0mg8Pj/view?usp=sharing

Experience

  • PW (PhysicsWallah) (Full-time · 3 yrs 10 mos)
    • Staff Software Engineer
      Apr 2026 - Present · 3 mos

    • Software Developer - 3 (Platform/DevOps)
      Mar 2024 - Mar 2026 · 2 yrs 1 mo

      As the team scaled, I took on high-impact, undefined problems in scale, cost, security, and governance, acting as the de-facto SPOC for cloud costs and infrastructure security. Mentored 10+ new members into the team and directly managing a team of 4. I own the following domains end-to-end: 1. Scale & Reliability: Architected solutions to handle platform growth efficiently, planned outage mitigations, and executed migrations to support increasing scale. 2. Cost Optimization: Delivered over $300K yearly cost savings by optimizing Kubernetes node provisioning, reducing resource wastage, overhauling backup strategies and tracking emerging cost-saving opportunities. 3. Security & Compliance: Owned perimeter security by optimizing WAF usage, implemented AWS Control Tower for security-by-default, and deployed runtime security modules to catch threats earlier in the development cycle. 4. Governance & Risk Management: Established audit trails and querying for critical infra, separated lower environments into dedicated accounts to reduce production blast radius, and acted as cloud security lead across the organization.

    • Software Developer - 2 (Platform/DevOps)
      Sep 2022 - Mar 2024 · 1 yr 7 mos

      As the second hire and a founding member of the Platform team at PW, I defined the core infrastructure strategy, built critical platforms from zero to scale, and transitioned ownership as the team grew to 20+ platform engineers. I owned the following domains end-to-end: 1. Resilience & Business Continuity: Defined and implemented the company’s disaster recovery strategy with multi-region active-active architectures, meeting strict RTO/RPO targets. 2. Scale & Performance Engineering: Established performance engineering as a core discipline; built a Kubernetes-based capacity testing platform that enabled 3× scale while reducing infra spend by ~$30K/month. 3. Platform Reliability & Architecture Modernization: Led the move to a fully automated, infrastructure-as-code-driven platform. Also - Drove the transition from monolith to microservices, improving API gateways, observability, and integration readiness. 4. Mission-Critical Product Infrastructure: Architected infrastructure for large-scale live classes, enabling record-breaking concurrent student participation and extreme real-time messaging throughput. 5. Engineering Velocity & Ownership Culture: Rebuilt CI/CD and developer workflows to significantly reduce build times and costs, while scaling ownership across teams.

  • Software Developer - 1 (DevOps) at PayPal
    Aug 2021 - Sep 2022 · 1 yr 2 mos

    Worked on the following domains: 1. Deployment Automation & Speed: Streamlined Kubernetes deployments using Ansible and Helm, improving consistency and release velocity. 2. Performance & Reliability: Optimized NGINX for higher performance and operational stability. 3. Self-Healing & Operational Efficiency: Built an autonomous Python-based self-healing system, reducing downtime and manual intervention.

  • Software Developer - 1 (DevOps) at SourceFuse
    Feb 2020 - Jul 2021 · 1 yr 6 mos

    Worked on the following domains: 1. Faster Delivery & Higher Dev Throughput: Reduced build and release times by owning CI/CD (AWS CodePipeline, Jenkins) with dynamic workers and Lerna. 2. Resilient, Observable Platforms: Kept production highly available by owning Kubernetes, observability (ELK, Prometheus), and leading incident response and RCAs. 3. Lower Cost, Stronger Security: Improved infra cost-efficiency and security by owning open-source PostgreSQL/Redis and cloud-native tooling (Istio, Vault, Consul).