Harshit Ruwali - Software Engineer

About

RoleSr. Software Engineer

FocusSystems, Data, AI

BaseIndia

I'm a Sr. Software Engineer at BHIVE Workspace, owning the data platform end-to-end: ETL architecture, warehouse design, vendor integrations, and the infrastructure underneath it. I built the team's in-house Superset MCP server and the internal data libraries everyone builds on top of. Before that: serverless migrations at itilite, CI/CD and bastion hosts at Plypicker.

Outside of work I run a homelab that's grown from a Raspberry Pi into a dual-socket Xeon box: Proxmox, OPNsense, and Tailscale on the networking side, local LLM inference and RAG on the GPU side. It's where I get to build and break things without a production blast radius.

Work Experience

Sr. Software Engineer

BHIVE Workspace

Jun 2024 – Present

Built and maintained the data platform handling batch processing pipelines and analytics, owning ETL architecture, data warehouse design, vendor integrations, and infrastructure end-to-end. Designed an in-house data ingestion and ETL platform using Python and DBT to load normalized data into a Star Schema warehouse. Built the team's in-house Superset MCP server along with custom internal data libraries and utilities. Contributed to the Reconciliation module automating validation between customer payments and issued invoices, and managed platform infrastructure, deployments, and monitoring across AWS.

Python DBT PostgreSQL AWS Superset MCP

Backend Engineer

itilite

Sept 2022 – May 2024

Led key initiatives migrating to a serverless microservices architecture, integrating Priceline vendors and optimizing flight and hotel booking workflows, reducing packaging time from 30s to 5s. Developed and maintained core mobile backend features, launching 4 major enhancements that boosted user engagement by 30%. Resolved an AWS API Gateway 29s timeout by introducing Redis-based response caching and chunked delivery for large payloads.

Python FastAPI Docker MongoDB Kafka AWS CDK AWS Lambda NodeJS MySQL Redis

DevOps Engineer Intern

Plypicker

May 2022 – Sept 2022

Implemented CI/CD pipelines using GitHub Actions and AWS CodePipeline for automated deployments to EC2 via CodeDeploy with load balancing, auto-scaling, and monitoring via Zabbix. Strengthened infrastructure security by deploying a Bastion Host across 3 private subnets with controlled internet gateway access.

AWS GitHub Actions EC2 CodeDeploy Zabbix

Education

B.Tech in Computer Science

Vellore Institute of Technology, Bhopal

2019 – 2023

CGPA: 8.54/10.

Projects

🧠

Open Memory Stack

Self-hosted memory, retrieval, and LLM middleware for AI applications: a durable memory backend, semantic search, and a FastAPI boundary for storing, searching, and updating context.

FastAPI PostgreSQL Qdrant Redis Docker

View on GitHub

📊

Persistent VM Monitoring Stack

Self-hosted monitoring for a Proxmox host, Linux VMs, and Docker-based applications: Grafana for dashboards, Prometheus for metrics, Loki for logs, and Grafana Alloy as the collector agent.

Grafana Prometheus Loki Docker Compose Proxmox

View on GitHub

⚡

PgPulse: PostgreSQL Extensions in Rust

A production-grade PostgreSQL extension built in Rust using unsafe FFI bindings to extend database capabilities at the system level, deployed and tested in RDS environments. Also ships as a service/CLI that monitors a primary and read replica, exposing replication lag and other metrics to Prometheus and Grafana.

Rust PostgreSQL FFI RDS Prometheus Grafana

View on GitHub

🎙️

Personalised Voice Assistant with Speaker Identification

Voice assistant that recognises multiple users via a 1D CNN and FFT-based speaker identification model, achieving 98% accuracy. Integrated speech recognition, intent handling, and real-time interaction through Flask APIs.

TensorFlow Keras Python PyAudio Flask

View on GitHub

🤖

OpenClaw: Personal AI Assistant

Self-hosted an open-source personal AI assistant as a systemd gateway service on my homelab, bridged into Matrix and WhatsApp for always-on access, with a persistent memory layer built on top of Open Memory Stack.

OpenClaw Matrix systemd Multi-channel

Project Site

View All Projects on GitHub

Homelab

Started with a Raspberry Pi as a cheap Linux playground in 2020, now a dual-socket Xeon workstation running Proxmox, OPNsense, Tailscale, and local LLM inference. Networking is the part I enjoy most, and half the fun is debugging why it didn't work.

Read the full homelab story

Raspberry Pi 4B

First homelab machine

2020

Bought during COVID lockdown as a cheap Linux playground: install Ubuntu Server, break it, reinstall, repeat. Learned SSH, systemd, cron, and Docker the hard way. SD cards turned out to be terrible for anything that mattered.

Ubuntu Server SSH Docker systemd cron

Arch Linux Desktop

Daily driver

2021 – Present

Hopped through Garuda, Debian, Ubuntu, and Pop!_OS before landing on Arch with i3. Installing it was the easy part: configuring drivers, display managers, and audio is where the real learning happened.

Arch Linux i3

Raspberry Pi 5 + Network Gear

The "can I self-host this?" era

March 2023

Upgraded to a Pi 5, picked up a TP-Link ER605 router and a 16-port PoE switch. Every open-source tool became a question: Plex, reverse proxies, Docker Compose stacks, monitoring, backups, VPNs, DNS.

Docker Compose Plex Reverse Proxy VPN DNS

MiniPC

Build/test machine

March 2026

Small and quiet but capable enough to run Rust builds without cooking my laptop. A bridge between Pi experiments and a proper dev workflow.

Dell Precision T7920

The big leap

Late 2026

Dual Xeon 6138 (40 cores / 80 threads), 128GB ECC RAM, and an RTX A5000 with 24GB VRAM, running Proxmox as the hypervisor. Opened up local model inference: Qwen, embeddings, vector DBs, RAG pipelines, and taught me about VRAM pressure and GPU scheduling the hard way.

Proxmox RTX A5000 Local LLM Inference RAG

Current stack: OPNsense Tailscale VLANs Proxmox A firewall, isolated networks, and VLANs keep AI workloads off the LAN while exposing only what's needed over Tailscale.

Next up: a proper NAS, Ceph, high availability, better observability, cleaner GitOps workflows, and maybe Kubernetes.

Achievements

📈

StackOverflow

1k+ Reputation

🏆

Sony's Dream to Reality Contest

Top 12 Nationwide

🔒

HackTheBox

Pro-Hacker, World Rank 552

🚩

TryHackMe

Wizard[0xA], Top 1% Worldwide

Latest from the Blog

Notes on systems, security, infrastructure, and everything in between.

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Get In Touch

Have an interesting project or just want to chat? Reach out on any of these.

📧

Email

ruwaliharshit@gmail.com

🐦

Twitter

@harshitruwali

💼

harshitruwali

✈️

@harshitruwali

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