Jairam Chandar

I lead multiple software engineering teams at Meltwater, where we build cloud-scale systems that crawl and make sense of the internet. Most days, the internet cooperates. The rest of the time, it’s a reminder that it’s all held together with hope and retries.

Before I started spending my days in 1:1s and strategy docs, I spent 15+ years working on distributed systems with Hadoop, Kafka, Cassandra, Elasticsearch, and the kind of infrastructure that fails in ways that are both surprising and, in hindsight, inevitable.

I write here about the things I’m figuring out along the way: managing engineers without micromanaging them, making technical decisions when you’re no longer the one writing the code, and occasionally wondering if monitoring dashboards counts as a hobby.

Practical over polished. Honest over impressive.