~/suraj.shhire me ↗

The longer version
of "who is suraj".

Grew up across Delhi, Calcutta, and Chennai. Been obsessed with computers since age four. ECE at SRM, then cloud, then AI infra. Currently building two products and leading a team of junior engineers. Likes boring tech that ships and the quiet hum of a green dashboard.

5+
years shipping
3
cloud platforms · prod
11
certifications
24
essays published
1
team currently leading

01 — originWhere I'm from

I grew up all over the country because my dad was a banker. Delhi, Calcutta, Chennai — I speak English, Hindi, and Tamil and I consider all three cities home in some way. He did not teach me how circuits work. He just kept moving us, and I found computers on my own.

We got our first computer when I was four, in 2003. One of those old CRT monitors with the beige tower. I used to play Feeding Frenzy on it. I know what a floppy disk looks like from the inside — I broke a couple of them as a kid. I broke Windows so many times that our family lost photos and videos I will never get back. That is how I learned you do not save everything to the C drive. That is how I learned about partitioning.

When I was seven I fought my mother to get our RAM upgraded from 512 MB to 1 GB. When I was eight or nine I dragged my parents to stores across Delhi looking for Windows Vista DVDs, brought them home, and burned ISOs I had looked up on YouTube. Windows 7 came out and I bugged my mother for weeks to get it installed — all because I wanted Windows Movie Maker and XP did not have it. At nine I was reading about port forwarding because I wanted to run a Hamachi server on a static IP. I broke our Airtel router trying and the technician who came to fix it was, I am told, visibly confused by the child standing in front of him.

I downloaded Ubuntu, burned the ISO to DVD, and dual-booted it onto our family PC. Broke that too. Then I burned another copy and installed it on the computer of two family friends who had no kids at home — they were so happy to have a ten-year-old wandering around their house doing things to their computer they did not understand. My nickname growing up was Laptop, given to me by an uncle. It fits.

I chose ECE at SRM because CSE was not available and ECE was the next closest thing. I was not interested in the IIT and NIT track — chasing marks to chase admissions was not the kind of building I wanted to do. I was interested in computers. I have been interested in computers since I was four. ECE taught me how they actually work: registers, clocks, the layers underneath the abstractions the cloud-native world likes to pretend do not exist.

I also played CS:GO competitively for a while — bootcamps, tournaments, representing the country. If you want to understand how I think about pressure and team dynamics, that period explains a lot.

My first job was at Infosys, building business intelligence automation. Unglamorous work and boring, as it did not interest me one bit. Sixteen months of VBA, SQL, and watching senior engineers debug production at 11pm taught me this is not what I wanted to do with my life. I left to pursue a career in the cloud.

02 — pivotThe cloud pivot

In 2023 I enrolled in Great Lakes's PG program in Cloud Computing. Nine months, online, and I took a break from my job. It was the most rewarding stretch of education in my life. I graduated with distinction and a clearer sense of what I wanted to do for the next decade: build platforms that other engineers want to use.

That led me to BONbLOC. I was rejected the first time — they wanted a senior lead with eight or nine years of experience, not another fresher. I asked for feedback. They brought me back in. I apparently said something in that second interview that stuck. I joined as a DevOps engineer working on McLane's environment — Ansible and Ansible Tower patching and automation, scanning scripts with Soteri, a lot of Linux, and more runbooks and playbooks than I can count. I learned more in that role than I expected when I walked through the door.

Good DevOps is mostly empathy. The pipeline isn't for you. It's for the engineer at 2am who has to fix something.

03 — nowWhere I am now

I joined Synergech on May 28, 2025 as a software engineer. By June 2nd I had a rough working prototype of InfraGenie — a GenAI Terraform provisioner — built in Python with a Streamlit front-end. My boss demoed it to a client in the US. They wanted to ship it. Since then I have been building it out properly.

I now also work directly with that client, building a second product that automates their M&A process end-to-end — they are an insurance company and they do a lot of acquisitions every year. I lead a team of four to five junior engineers across both products. Two of them have gone from zero to running customer demos. That is the part I am proudest of.

04 — when I'm notOff the clock

I cook with my girlfriend. We do a lot of continental — pasta, stir-fries, whatever we are in the mood for — but I also make Rasam, Sambar, Paneer gravy, and the occasional Kadai when I want something that feels like home. I am a very visual and auditory learner, so I read documentation, watch tutorials, and listen to a lot of podcasts. Coffee is a non-negotiable. Coffee-making videos are weirdly good at calming my mind and I will not apologize for that. I like to travel.

I have been getting into writing. This blog is where I am trying to figure out what I actually think about the things I work on. Come read it.

things I believe

Six opinions I'm willing to defend.

01

Boring tech that ships beats exciting tech that demos.

I will pick PostgreSQL and a long-running Python service over the buzzword stack every time. The team thanks me three quarters later.

02

The pipeline isn't for you. It's for whoever's on call at 2am.

Optimise for the worst day, not the average day. Good runbooks are a love letter to your future self.

03

If you can't explain it on a napkin, you don't understand it yet.

Every architecture decision in InfraGenie started as a napkin sketch. We still keep the photos.

04

LLMs are routers, not writers.

The most reliable AI products I've shipped used the model to pick from a small, vetted set of moves. Don't ask it to write the move.

05

Empathy compounds. So does pedantry. Choose carefully.

The smartest engineers I know are the kindest in code review. The two skills are correlated, not opposed.

06

Write it down. Always.

If a decision isn't written down, it didn't happen. ADRs, runbooks, blog posts — the medium doesn't matter. The writing does.

influences · 2026

Where I steal from.

what I'm reading

  • Site Reliability EngineeringGoogle
  • Docs, mostly. RFCs, changelogs, whitepapers — I read more documentation than books and I am fine with that.

people I follow closely

  • Boris Shoni
  • Rekarpati — I learned how to speedsolve a Rubik's Cube from him in 2011 when he went by Bat Mephisto. Thirteen years later I am still learning from him.

podcasts in the rotation

  • The Joe Rogan Experience
  • FlagrantAndrew Schulz
  • Brilliant IdiotsCharlamagne & Schulz
  • Raj Shamani Podcast
  • Shawn Ryan Show
  • The Pragmatic EngineerGergely Orosz
off the clock

The non-engineer stuff.

cooking · continental + south indian
coffee · brewing + watching
podcasts · audio learner
traveling · wherever possible

The full CV, on paper.

One page. Two columns. The same story, condensed for hiring managers.

download resume.pdf →