Nikhil Chawla

About Nikhil Chawla

I’m a performance-focused software engineer with hands-on experience in building, optimizing, and scaling distributed systems, databases, and storage platforms.At Microsoft, I lead performance engineering for PostgreSQL on Azure, driving innovations in core Postgres internals, telemetry, and stress testing frameworks. I own end-to-end solutions that enhance platform scalability, operational resilience, and customer experience — including proactive protection mechanisms for replication lag and system stalls.In my previous roles, I worked across both QA and core development — contributing to a high-performance RocksDB-based key-value store, optimizing encryption and data migration, and debugging high-throughput production workloads. I also led distributed filesystem testing and automation across NFS, SMB, and S3 protocols, and developed Kubernetes operators and performance tooling for large-scale cloud-native infrastructure. Core Skills:Languages: C++, C#, Golang, PythonSystems: PostgreSQL internals, RocksDB, Kubernetes, OpenStack, GlusterFSAreas: Performance engineering, distributed systems, observability, fault toleranceTools: FIO, Sysbench, PgBench, YCSB, Ansible, Prometheus, custom telemetry pipelinesI bring a strong mix of low-level debugging, high-scale systems thinking, and product-oriented execution — and I\'m always looking to solve hard performance problems that impact real-world systems at scale.

Experience

1. Software Engineer Ii

   Microsoft

   Jun 2024 — Present · Noida, IN

   I lead strategic initiatives to improve the performance, reliability, and operational excellence of PostgreSQL on Azure. As part of the Azure Postgres Performance team, my role blends deep technical problem-solving with end-to-end ownership of systems that directly impact customer experience and platform scalability.Impact:* Driving research and innovation to improve core Postgres performance at scale, influencing long-term roadmap and engineering best practices.* Designing a proactive performance protection mechanism that mitigates replication lag, autovacuum starvation, and system stalls by identifying and terminating harmful long-running or prepared transactions before they cause cascading issues.* Management of a stress and longevity testing framework to evaluate and validate system resilience under sustained and high-throughput workloads.* Spearheading improvements in telemetry and observability, enabling proactive and faster resolution of complex performance issues across the Azure Postgres fleet.* Serving as an owner for customer performance escalations, partnering with product, support, and engineering teams to drive root cause analysis and durable solutions.

Education

• Guru Gobind Singh Indraprastha University

  Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.), Computer Science

  2013 — 2017

Skills

• C++
• Containerization
• Microservices
• Data Mining
• Cloud Computing
• Mysql
• Html
• Software Development
• Python
• Javascript
• Cluster Analysis
• Kubernetes
• Databases
• Sql
• Linux
• Docker
• Cython
• Representational State Transfer (Rest)
• Cascading Style Sheets (Css)
• Application Programming Interfaces
• Programming
• Django
• Microsoft Office
• Data Analysis
• Scalability
• Go
• Flask