Krushi Raj Tula

01 / About

I’m a senior full-stack engineer who loves solving hard problems and fixing things with technology. I own products end to end, React and Next.js frontends, Node and Python services, and the search, data, and infrastructure underneath, and I care as much about how a system behaves in production as how it’s built.

Since 2020 I’ve been building at Paperpile, currently as the sole engineer behind its internal academic search platform. A lot of my work lately is AI-native: MCP servers, agent harnesses, and guardrails that keep LLMs honest. I ship open-source developer tools on the side and write about what I learn on my blog.

7+ yrsshipping production software

Full-stackfrontend, backend, data & infra

End-to-enddesign, ship, run, and own it

AI-nativeMCP servers, agents & guardrails

02 / Experience

Jan 2020 - Present
Full Time

Senior Full Stack Engineer

Paperpile

Sole developer of Paperpile's internal academic search platform, a 230M+ document system I own end to end (React/Next.js, Node/TypeScript; MongoDB, Elasticsearch, PostgreSQL).

Cut p99 search latency from ~10s to under 1s by redesigning indexing and query paths across Elasticsearch, MongoDB, and SQLite.
Cut Elasticsearch load about 55% without adding capacity, by moving rarely changing journal data into a replicated per-server SQLite FTS file and caching URL-crawl results for a day.
Designed and maintained 10+ microservices handling millions of dynamic-payload messages, with strict retries, ordering, and idempotency.
Built ingestion pipelines processing 300GB+ of text monthly, and raised corpus abstract coverage from 27% to 51% with crawler/scraper engines.

TypeScriptReactNode.jsExpressElasticsearchMongoDBPostgreSQLSQLiteDockerJenkinsAWSApifyData pipelinesCrawlersParsersLinux server management

Jul 2019 - Dec 2019
Full Time

Software Developer

NCR Corporation

Built the Content Management and Advertising module for ATM machines and cut ad initial-load latency from ~2 minutes to under 30 seconds on constrained, low-bandwidth hardware; root-caused a production defect blocking a major bank chain's ads.

JavaJavaScript

Jan 2019 - Jun 2019
Internship

Software Engineering Intern

ServiceNow

Full-stack developer with a Seismic frontend on the ServiceNow platform. Took a use case from design and analysis through prototype to a fully functional shipped feature.

JavaScriptServiceNow

May 2018 - Jun 2018
Internship · Remote

UI Developer · Interns' Team Lead

Verzeo

Led a team of interns building the frontend for an e-commerce site, contributing UI development while coordinating the team's output.

HTMLCSSJavaScript

2022 - Present
Teaching · Part-time

Adjunct Faculty & Guest Lecturer

Vasavi College of Engineering

Teach and mentor IT students at my alma mater, with guest lectures on full-stack development and DevOps, hands-on project reviews, and placement coaching.

Deliver guest lectures on full-stack development and DevOps (Docker, Kubernetes), with comparative backend teaching across Express.js, Django, and Java/Spring Boot.
Review student projects and advise on architecture and implementation decisions, including guiding students' RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation) builds.
Mentor students for placements: run mock interviews, give profile feedback, and coach problem-solving and technical skills.
Served as a judge at Tech Savishkar, a national-level hackathon hosted by the college.

MentoringGuest lecturesMock interviewsHackathon judge

03 / Skills

Languages

TypeScriptJavaScriptPythonGoRustJavaC#C

Frontend

ReactNext.jsVueHTMLCSSTailwindSASS

Backend & APIs

Node.jsExpressDjangoGraphQL

Data & Search

ElasticsearchPostgreSQLMongoDBRedisClickHouseSQLiteMySQL

Infra & Delivery

DockerKubernetesAWSELK StackJenkinsJestMocha

Daily Drivers

Claude CodeVS CodeGitPyCharmUnity3D

04 / Selected Works

Royal Lands

Jul 2026

An online multiplayer kingdom-building tile-placement game for 2–4 players, built to learn Go and PixiJS: server-authoritative rules engine, event-sourced SQLite persistence, WebSockets, deployed on Railway.

babygo

Jul 2026

Go by Example, run like rustlings: all 85 programs with the load-bearing lines cut out, a watcher that re-runs on save, and a checker that machine-verifies every single exercise.

Fibozzle, in Rust

Jul 2026

A Rust remake of Fibbozle, my old C console game (2048 where tiles merge along the Fibonacci series), rebuilt as a full Ratatui TUI with saves, undo, and a leaderboard, and shipped on Homebrew.

Content Generation Harness

Feb 2026

A multi-agent harness I built on top of Claude Code that turns a single topic into a finished video, a set of shorts, a carousel, and the copy to publish it all, and cut my production time by about 10x.

Self-Hosted Backup Tools

Nov 2025

A few small tools I built while moving my own data off the cloud and onto my home NAS, shared for anyone else backing up Google and Snapchat exports.

gist-pdf

Nov 2025

A tool I built to turn GitHub Gists into clean PDFs, then packaged it properly for Homebrew, APT, Cargo, and Docker.

All project write-ups →

05 / Writings

Aug 16, 2026

Prompt, harness, context, loop, graph: the jargon is a changelog

Every few months AI grows another x-engineering word. Each one marks the spot where the layer below it leaked, and where control moved one step further out of the model.

→

Aug 15, 2026

Prompt, harness, context, loop, graph: the jargon is a changelog

Every few months AI grows a new x-engineering word. They are not marketing. Each one marks the exact spot where the layer below it leaked, and where control moved one step further out of the model.

→

Aug 05, 2026

Two fake job assessments tried to hack me in four days

Two fake recruiter technical assessments four days apart were both malware, one armed git hooks and one a poisoned npm dependency. How they work, how the payload steals wallets and keys, the new prompt injection twist against AI reviewers, and a scanner plus agent hook to catch the next one.

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Mar 17, 2024