Nitish Kumar: CV

Protocol and backend engineer, DeFi infrastructure · GitHub @technitish9123 · LinkedIn · X @Nekotish

Nitish Kumar is a protocol and backend engineer who has built crypto and fintech backend infrastructure since July 2022: blockchain indexers, institutional custody systems, DeFi protocol services and smart contracts, in Rust, TypeScript, Go and Solidity. He currently works at Timeswap Labs.

Experience

Protocol / Backend Engineer, Timeswap Labs

Mar 2026 – present · Rust indexer and API for a DeFi fixed-rate lending protocol on Arbitrum and other EVM chains

• Sole engineer on the production Rust backend (about 165k lines; Tokio, alloy, sqlx/Postgres, axum/async-graphql, moka): a multi-chain EVM indexer that decodes contract events into user positions, one async task per chain.
• Reorg recovery with detection, atomic rollback and single-leader recovery via a Postgres advisory lock; crash-safe ingestion with a per-chain write-ahead log, periodic checkpoints, idempotent upserts and invariant-checking replay.
• 2,200+ tests, including property-based (proptest) and Anvil end-to-end reorg suites; clippy -D warnings in CI.
• Owns deployment and observability: Docker, GitHub Actions, Terraform on AWS (EC2, RDS), OpenTelemetry traces and DogStatsD metrics to Datadog, SLOs and runbooks.

Backend Engineer, Timeswap Labs

Jun 2025 – Mar 2026 · TypeScript platform (Timeswap V3) on AWS EKS

• Authored about 45% of all commits on the V3 system: a multi-chain event platform across 6 EVM chains, 15k+ blocks a day at under 2 s latency, 100k+ positions.
• Kafka pipelines with ancestry-chain reorg detection, deterministic checkpointing and idempotent replay; manual offset commits, backoff retries, a dead-letter queue and consumer-lag health checks.
• GraphQL and WebSocket APIs for the app and third-party integrators at 150 ms average across 10k+ requests an hour.
• Reconciliation against on-chain state to 1-wei tolerance, which caught 3 critical edge cases in flash-loan and failed-transaction handling before users were affected; found and fixed 4 state-corruption bugs in reorg rollback, backed by 35 end-to-end reorg tests.
• Led zero-downtime migrations across 3 contract versions with dual-pipeline cutover and transaction-level replay validation.

Senior Blockchain Engineer, Diamante

Apr 2025 – May 2025

• Built Go storage modules (PostgreSQL, CouchDB) for a Stellar-fork Layer 1 ledger with replay-safe state persistence under consensus finality constraints.

Blockchain Developer, Liminal Custody Solutions

Nov 2023 – Apr 2025 · institutional digital-asset custody on Ethereum, Polygon and BSC

• Built a Go transaction-simulation engine on EVM state snapshots that validates every client transfer before signing, cutting on-chain failure rates by 45%.
• Worked on MPC/HSM key management and transaction signing flows; decoupled multisig approval logic from Safe’s APIs to support 3 chains.
• Cut transaction-history API latency from 6–7 s to under 300 ms with Redis caching; replaced static token configuration with RPC-based discovery, removing 20+ manual changes a month.
• Shipped CI/CD (Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions) for zero-downtime deploys across 3 environments.

Founding Engineer, Hashmail

Jul 2022 – Aug 2023

• Took a decentralised messaging product from concept to 500+ beta users (MySQL and IPFS, with cryptographic proof of message authenticity).
• Built a real-time contract-event indexer processing 10k+ transactions a day with 50% faster queries.
• Wrote audited ERC-20, 721 and 4626 contracts 35% cheaper in gas than the OpenZeppelin baseline.

Projects

• Arcus, a term-rate order book (Devcon 2024 hackathon, built and demoed). A central limit order book for lending USDC by rate and maturity: Rust matching engine, atomic cross-book roll orders, batch clearing, write-ahead-log event sourcing and Solidity settlement on Arbitrum.
• ETHIndia 2023, Safe track winner. A cross-chain DeFi lending prototype. One of three hackathon track wins.
• Aave liquidation monitor. Real-time health-factor and liquidation-risk tracking across 15k+ positions with liquidation simulation and under 500 ms alert latency.
• solidity-vm-go (Go). An educational Ethereum-style VM: a Solidity-to-AST parser, a simplified AST-to-bytecode compiler and a stack/memory/storage VM with simplified gas.
• tron-transfer (Go). Creates, signs and broadcasts TRC-20 token transfers on TRON.

Research

• Dynamic Graph Rewiring in Decentralized Exchange Networks: A Study of MEV-Induced Liquidity Fragmentation. Nanyang Blockchain Conference (NBC ’26), NTU Singapore, 2026.

Recognition

• ETHIndia 2023 winner, Safe track; 3 hackathon track wins.
• 40+ security vulnerabilities responsibly disclosed; Hall of Fame credits at PayU and Harvard.

Education

• B.E., Information Science and Engineering, NITTE Meenakshi Institute of Technology (VTU).

Skills

• Languages: Rust, TypeScript and Node.js, Go, Solidity, SQL
• Rust: Tokio, axum, async-graphql, sqlx, alloy, ruint, moka, tracing and OpenTelemetry, proptest, criterion
• Distributed systems: Kafka (consumer groups, manual offsets, dead-letter queues, lag monitoring), write-ahead logs, checkpoints, replay and rollback, idempotency, leader election, event sourcing
• Data: PostgreSQL (schema design, query tuning, indexing, pool isolation), Redis, MongoDB, MySQL, CouchDB
• Blockchain: EVM internals (Ethereum, Arbitrum, Polygon, BSC), reorg handling, RPC integration, ERC-20/721/1155/4626, ethers v6, viem, Foundry, Stellar-fork Layer 1
• Custody and security: MPC/HSM key management, Safe multisig, pre-signing transaction simulation, smart-contract auditing, vulnerability research
• DeFi and trading: order books and matching engines, batch auctions, atomic multi-leg execution, term-rate pricing, lending, liquidations, MEV, AMMs
• Cloud and DevOps: AWS (EKS, EC2, RDS, ElastiCache), Kubernetes, Helm, Terraform, Docker, GitHub Actions, Datadog