Who this is
I am Shrey Paharia, an independent contract software engineer working remotely with teams worldwide. I have spent about ten years on backend and distributed systems, most of it in places where a wrong answer costs money before anyone notices it is wrong: trading engines, exchange integrations, pricing systems, and lately the LLM agent pipelines that companies are pushing into production faster than they are building the tests for them. I work alone. There is no agency behind this site, no bench of subcontractors, and no account manager between you and the person writing the code.
What I have shipped
Right now I am the contract senior engineer on the Go hedging engine at Ostium, a perpetual futures exchange backed by General Catalyst and Jump Crypto, where the system I architected manages market exposure across more than $38B of volume with end-to-end execution under 50ms. Before that I was contract tech lead at Rage Trade, a perpetuals aggregator that routed over $6B across eight or more exchanges. On the AI side I built a QA agent pipeline for a games studio that turns PRDs into reviewed test plans and now runs sixty percent of its cases without a human, cutting production bugs by forty percent. I also build and maintain octomux, an open-source platform for running autonomous coding agents against real repositories.
How I work
Every engagement starts with a free thirty-minute call about the system, not a sales deck. Within forty-eight hours you get a written one-page scope: what I will build, what I will deliberately leave alone, how long it takes and what it costs. Pricing is per engagement because the problems are not interchangeable, so there is no rate card on this site. During the build you get a shared channel, a demo every week, and every commit landing in your repository from day one — which means if the engagement is going wrong you find out in week one, not at the end. The runbook, the architecture walkthrough and the handover session are written into the scope from the start, so nothing depends on me still answering my email a year later.
What I do not do
I do not staff teams, resell subcontractors, or sell fixed productized packages. I do not take design-led marketing or CMS work with no systems problem in it, and I do not offer ongoing managed operations or 24/7 on-call after handover. If your problem is one of those, saying so on the call takes five minutes and costs neither of us anything.