NilavVaghasiya
Staff Software Engineer at Visa Austin, Texas Mumbai → Arlington → Austin
I work on the payments plumbing that nobody thinks about until it breaks — roughly 4.2 billion transactions a year of it. The rest of my attention goes to whatever the internet has decided is interesting this week.
- Building
- Payments framework & service orchestration at Visa Core services in a distributed system holding six nines of uptime.
- Learning
- To DJ Currently at the stage where the beatmatch lands about half the time.
- Running
- Language models on hardware I own Ollama and LM Studio, MCP servers, agent frameworks — mostly to find where they fall over.
- Reading
- Too many tabs, most of them Reddit Career lurker. High read-to-post ratio, no plans to fix it.
Chasing whatever the internet just found
My day job is deliberate and slow — money moving correctly matters more than money moving fast. So the after-hours version of me is the opposite: install the thing, break the thing, read the thread about why the thing broke. Local language models are the current rabbit hole. Running them on my own hardware is more interesting than calling an API, mostly because you get to watch exactly where they stop working.
Lately I've been learning to DJ, which turns out to be a distributed systems problem with worse consequences for getting the timing wrong. Two tracks, one clock, no rollback.
If you're looking for me, I'm probably three comments deep in a thread I have no business being in.
Staff Software Engineer
Visa Inc. 06/2022 — now- Build and maintain core services in the payments framework and service orchestration layer — including time-sensitive settlement, database migrations, and I/O optimization on components I own outright.
- Implemented mTLS authorization for internal services that expose PII, and pushed security fixes left into normal development instead of leaving them to audit season.
- Built the Processor Management API, which turned a 200-day processor onboarding into a 20-day one by making configuration dynamic.
- Automated production config for Visa Platform Connect settlement gateways, supporting acquirer migration onto the MAZE settlement engine — now about 38% of CyberSource's settlement volume.
- Enabled multi-capture transaction amounts in the global settlement file, which quietly fixed a lot of downstream accuracy.
Promoted from Senior Software Engineer, May 2026.
Software Engineer
Dematic Corp 11/2021 — 06/2022- Warehousing SaaS, cloud and self-hosted. Owned automated unit and integration suites, and argued about database access patterns in design reviews.
Software Engineer, Java
Tata Consultancy Services 09/2020 — 11/2021- Broke an Oracle Forms monolith into asynchronous Spring Boot microservices for POS centers — 20+ forms rebuilt as REST endpoints averaging 30 ms.
MS, Computer Science
UT Arlington 2020- Thesis on extractive summarization and simplification of scholarly literature — making dense papers readable, years before everyone had a chatbot to do it badly.
- Departmental scholarship for academic work and research.
BE, Information Technology
Mumbai University 2018- Published Mobile based trigger system for near ultrasonic sound at an IEEE conference. It has picked up citations since, which still surprises me.
- DailyJava, Spring, Vert.x, Python, Kotlin, TypeScript
- At scaleKubernetes, Docker, Kafka, Hazelcast, Oracle, Redis, Cassandra
- Watching itDatadog, Splunk, Grafana, distributed tracing, custom metrics
- Trusting itJUnit, Mockito, Karate, Gatling, mTLS, Checkmarx, SonarQube
- For funOllama, LM Studio, LangChain, MCP servers, CrewAI, vector databases
Good reasons to email me
A hard distributed systems problem, something you've built that I should try, or a genuinely underrated corner of the internet. Also fine: telling me my beatmatching needs work.