Rafee Mohamed

MTS @ Surveysparrow · Backend, Systems & Infrastructure Engineering

Chennai, India

A software engineer building and operating production backend systems and distributed infrastructure at scale. I think about systems from first principles, exploring distributed systems, storage engines, system design, and backend architecture through side projects and experimentation.

I write about system design and engineering, sharing what I learn from building real systems and exploring how complex systems work under the hood.

Experience

Member of Technical Staff - Surveysparrow

May 2026 - Present

Designing how tenant-level integrity rules evolve safely in live, multi-tenant systems while maintaining consistency.

Product Developer - Surveysparrow

May 2024 - Apr 2026

Worked across the platform's backend - re-architecting the notification workflow system into modular microservice, scaling analytics infrastructure and improving performance of analytical workloads.

Product Developer Intern - Surveysparrow

Jul 2023 - Apr 2024

Built analytics capabilities into the product for understanding customer feedback. Designed dashboard widgets that made those signals explorable.

Featured projects

All projects

A fault-tolerant, strongly consistent distributed key-value store designed for coordination, distributed locking, and metadata management.

An embeddable MVCC key-value store that retains the complete mutation history of every key, with snapshot-isolated reads and incremental background compaction.

Recent blogs

All blogs

The saga pattern for long-lived business transactions. Coordinating multi-step workflows across services without holding locks, and handling failure through compensations.

How distributed systems get every node to agree on whether a transaction committed. From two-phase commit through Paxos Commit, and the safety/liveness trade-offs each one makes.