About Jagadesh

Go-first engineering leadership

I’m Jagadesh Achanta, a staff-level Go engineer and platform builder based in St. Louis, Missouri. For the past decade I’ve led and delivered Go codebases—from low-latency risk engines to Kubernetes control planes—while coaching teams on the engineering discipline that keeps production systems boring.

I thrive at the intersection of backend development and infrastructure. That means I can dive into an overstretched monolith in the morning, sketch a distributed design over lunch, and ship a reconciler or automation that makes the whole system safer by the end of the week. My compass is simple: ship value, own reliability, mentor the people around me.

Principles I work by

• Production empathy – profiling, tracing, and observability come before cleverness. If we can’t explain a graph, we don’t ship it.
• Plain language, no surprises – stakeholders always know what changed, why, and how it performed in production.
• Shared ownership – pair programming, ADRs, and documentation that make sure the code lives beyond the individuals who wrote it.
• Bias for enablement – build golden paths, developer tooling, and runbooks so teams move faster after I leave than before I arrived.

Career highlights

• Fintech risk scoring – reworked Go services handling 20k req/sec, introducing structured logging, pprof-guided tuning, and guardrailed deployments that met global audit requirements.
• Managed Kubernetes product – led the Go-based control plane that provisioned and governed 1k+ clusters across AWS, GCP, and Azure; designed reconciliation loops and multi-tenant RBAC with controller-runtime.
• Healthcare ML platform – authored operators in Go to automate Kubeflow pipelines and GPU scheduling; ensured HIPAA/SOC2 evidence was baked into service code and CI/CD.
• Startup advisory – coached founding teams through the jump from prototypes to production Go services, establishing testing strategies, observability, and hiring plans.

How an engagement runs

1. Assess & align – walk the architecture, review incidents, read the Go code, and surface the highest-leverage fixes or features.
2. Co-build & iterate – pair with engineers to deliver Go services, controllers, or platform tooling with tests, instrumentation, and docs.
3. Level-up & hand off – run workshops, deliver design notes, and embed guardrails so the team owns the system with confidence.

Tools I reach for

• Languages: Go, Python, Bash; familiar with TypeScript for developer portals and tooling.
• Frameworks: gRPC, REST, event streaming patterns, controller-runtime, OpenTelemetry, Cobra/CLI tooling.
• Infrastructure: Kubernetes (GKE/EKS/AKS/on-prem), Helm, Kustomize, Terraform, Pulumi, Crossplane, GitHub Actions, ArgoCD, Tekton.
• Observability: Prometheus, Grafana, Tempo, Loki, Honeycomb; pprof, go test -bench, and continuous profiling.

Community & credentials

• Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA) & Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)
• AWS Certified Solutions Architect; Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect
• Open-source contributor to operator patterns and Go tooling; mentor at CNCF Community Days and Go meetups

Outside client work you’ll find me experimenting with Go runtime internals, maintaining a homelab cluster, or volunteering with St. Louis STEM programmes to help students build their first robots. If you’re hiring for a Go-heavy role and want someone who can lead with calm, curiosity, and execution, let’s talk.