About
I'm a software engineer by training, but I'm interested in much more than software. I care about how complex systems behave—technical systems, organizations, and even learning itself.
The problems that fascinate me tend to share a few traits: they're complex, they involve tradeoffs that aren't obvious, and understanding them requires going deeper than surface-level explanations. Whether it's distributed systems, autonomy, or how people reason about hard problems, I'm drawn to things that require real thinking.
Why I Write
I write to understand. Most explanations are misleading—they skip the hard parts, oversimplify the tradeoffs, or present a polished narrative that hides the messy reality. Writing forces me to confront what I actually understand versus what I think I understand.
This site is where I think in public. It's a way to document what I learn, explore ideas I care about, and hopefully help others who are trying to understand the same things.
Background
I currently work at AWS Config, where I focus on building reliable, large-scale infrastructure. Previously, I worked on AWS Route53 (DNS and edge systems) and at Stripe on payments infrastructure.
These roles have given me deep exposure to Tier-0 systems, control planes, distributed systems, and what it actually takes to build infrastructure that can't fail. But they're context, not identity.
What I Write About
- •Systems & Infrastructure: Distributed systems, reliability, control planes, and how things scale
- •AI, Autonomy & Robotics: How ML systems work, why autonomy is hard, and what people misunderstand
- •How Systems Fail: Real postmortems, incident response, and production reality
- •Engineering Careers: Interviews, learning deeply, and building technical teams
- •How I Think: Approaching complex domains, understanding vs. memorizing, and learning in public
Connect
You can find me on:
- • LinkedIn: batrasamarth
- • Email: Feel free to reach out if you want to discuss complex systems, infrastructure, or anything I write about