Ajay Karki

Head of Engineering @ AerawatKathmandu, Nepal · 27.7°N 85.3°E--:--:-- NPT

I’m Ajay Karki — a software engineer and engineering leader, currently Head of Engineering at Aerawat. For over six years I’ve designed, scaled and shipped the backend of Nepal’s largest digital wallet and a US bioinformatics platform: the services, the databases under them, the cloud they run on, and the pipelines that ship them.

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fig. 01 — a request, end to end live

00Approach

Ajay KarkiKTM

I care about the details that compound — connection pools under burst traffic, a query plan doing one join too many, the pipeline that costs a team twenty minutes on every deploy. I treat engineering as an optimization problem with real business constraints, and I lead teams the same way: make the right thing the easy thing, then measure it.

01Selected work

One engineering org, many productssimplified

Aerawat

Head of Engineering

01AerawatKathmandu, NepalJun 2026 — Present

Running engineering across a portfolio of products.

Heading engineering at Aerawat — setting technical direction and leading the teams that build and run RxPIN, IEP Sunflower and more.

One engineering org, many productssimplified

products under one engineering org: 3+; products under one engineering org

01Lead engineering for RxPIN, a platform for therapists, parents and centers to coordinate autism therapy, track progress and surface AI-driven insights.
02Lead engineering for IEP Sunflower.
03Own technical direction and delivery across the rest of Aerawat's product portfolio.

visit ↗

02BasepairBiotech · United StatesFeb 2025 — Jun 2026

Making a bioinformatics platform cheaper to run and faster to ship.

Managed engineering on a US bioinformatics platform — tightening the database layer, codifying the infrastructure, and making the system observable end to end.

Connection pooling + read routingsimplified

query cost on critical APIs: −40%; query cost on critical APIs
database operating cost: −50%; database operating cost
minutes per deploy: 30→10; minutes per deploy

01Rewrote expensive query plans and removed redundant ORM joins in critical APIs.
02Put AWS RDS Proxy in front of Postgres for centralized connection pooling, so burst traffic stops exhausting connections.
03Added read-routing and connection-usage rules to cut database spend.
04Built infrastructure-as-code deploy pipelines with AWS CDK.
05Migrated legacy token auth to DRF/JWT-compatible flows with zero disruption to existing clients.
06Introduced structured canonical logs for cross-service tracing and faster root-cause analysis.

Python / Django / AWS CDK / RDS Proxy / PostgreSQL / JWT / GitHub Actions

03KhaltiFintech · LalitpurAug 2021 — Feb 2025

Taking Nepal's largest digital wallet from monolith to services.

Three and a half years on the core of a national wallet — splitting the monolith, taking pressure off the Core Banking System, and widening what the wallet can pay for.

Monolith → servicessimplified

load on the Core Banking System: −40%; load on the Core Banking System
API latency: −66%; API latency
utility services integrated: 150+; utility services integrated

01Architected the migration from a monolith to microservices.
02Cached limit checks in Redis — transaction processing 33% faster, fewer aggregation queries on the database.
03Moved reads to read-only databases and reworked Postgres/MySQL indexing.
04Built Dagster + Pandas pipelines for large datasets — report generation time and DB load down 60%.
05Integrated flights, bus ticketing, electricity and 150+ other utility services into the core system.
06Introduced pre-commit hooks and unit and API test coverage.

Python / Django / Microservices / Redis / Dagster / Pandas / PostgreSQL / MySQL / RabbitMQvisit ↗

04Sparrow SMSMessaging · LalitpurMay 2022 — Jul 2024

Bulk messaging that banks — and the World Food Programme — could trust.

Owned a high-volume Viber messaging product end to end, including the middleware that let financial institutions plug in safely.

Compliant messaging middlewaresimplified

project lifecycle owned: End-to-end; project lifecycle owned
MidDay Meal Monitoring platform: WFP; MidDay Meal Monitoring platform

01Led development and launch of a secure, high-volume Viber bulk messaging system.
02Engineered banking-sector middleware for secure, compliant Viber integration with financial institutions.
03Designed and built the World Food Programme's MidDay Meal Monitoring platform, with SMS-triggered reporting.
04Ran the team's Jira boards as Scrum Master.

Python / Django / Viber API / SMSvisit ↗

05Quantum IT SolutionsAgency · KathmanduJan 2020 — Jul 2021

Setting up the delivery practice from scratch.

First role out of university: shipping client products while introducing the tooling and process the team didn't have yet.

Serverless video → HLSsimplified

AWS, DigitalOcean, Alibaba Cloud: 3 clouds; AWS, DigitalOcean, Alibaba Cloud
serverless video pipeline: HLS; serverless video pipeline

01Introduced Docker and GitHub Actions CI/CD to the team.
02Automated video processing with AWS Lambda + MediaConvert to convert uploads to HLS for an LMS.
03Ran servers across AWS, DigitalOcean and Alibaba Cloud.
04Introduced Scrum with Jira and mentored junior engineers and interns in Django.

Python / Django / Docker / AWS Lambda / MediaConvert / GitHub Actions / DigitalOcean

02Disciplines

Services with clear boundaries, auth that migrates without breaking clients, background work that doesn't block requests.
Python · Django · Django REST Framework · Celery · Temporal · RabbitMQ
Applied at Khalti, Basepair, Sparrow SMS

03Career

2026 —
Aerawat
Head of Engineering · Kathmandu, Nepal
2025 — 2026
Basepair
Engineering Manager · Biotech, United States
2022 — 2024
Sparrow SMS
Software Engineer (part-time) · Messaging, Lalitpur
2021 — 2025
Khalti Digital Wallet
Senior Software Engineer, Team Lead · Fintech, Lalitpur
2020 — 2021
Quantum IT Solutions
Python / Django Developer · Kathmandu
2015 — 2019
Paschimanchal Campus, Tribhuvan University
Bachelor in Computer Engineering · Pokhara