Harishkumar Pillai
Go Backend Engineer — DNS/Security/Performance
Backend Engineer (Go) focused on DNS/security and performance: CoreDNS plugins for inline policy & exfil detection, Caddy hardening, Prometheus/Grafana, pprof tuning, dnsperf benchmarking, and fast local lookups with LevelDB.
$ cat experience.log
Software Engineer 2
Akamai Technologies, India
Bangalore, India
- ▸ Built a custom Prometheus node exporter in Go to expose VM metrics on a dedicated port with a 1s scrape interval for visibility.
- ▸ Benchmarked end-to-end DNS latency using dnsperf pre/post rollout and tuning.
- ▸ Implemented inline DNS policy in CoreDNS (Go) using LevelDB to load MB/GB threat intel locally for REFUSED/BLOCK/BYPASS decisions with low lookup latency; validated using live-like traffic profiles.
Software Engineer 1
Akamai Technologies, India
Bangalore, India
- ▸ Built a CoreDNS plugin (Go) for DNS exfiltration detection with inline feature extraction + ONNX Runtime scoring; blocked 99% of simulated exfil attempts with negligible added latency.
- ▸ Upgraded and hardened Caddy (to 2.8.x) with org-specific patches; closed known CVEs; authored upgrade playbooks and health checks.
- ▸ Fixed a memory leak in an HTTP forwarder using pprof; added CI regression reports; reduced flakiness.
- ▸ Implemented a conditional DNS forwarder (Go) using subnet-aware routing rules that reduced average request latency for targeted domains and enabled 100% customer policy enforcement.
- ▸ Migrated a data stack from AWS (Scala/Hadoop/Hive) to Linode (Python/PySpark/Kafka/Argo/Kubernetes), reducing annual operating cost by 90% and improving iteration speed.
- ▸ CI/CD for containers using Jenkins & GitHub Actions with pre-merge validation; high functional coverage with Pytest/Allure leading to fewer escapes to validation.
Junior Software Test Automation Engineer
EPAM Systems, India
Hyderabad, India
- ▸ Automated UI/API regressions for Thomson Reuters WestLaw (Selenium/TestNG); improved coverage and reduced manual effort.
Graduate Technical Intern
Oracle RGBU, Bangalore
Bangalore, India
- ▸ Automated testing for Oracle Cloud Retail Application platform.
$ cat education.txt
M.Tech (CSE)
Institute of Technology, Nirma University
Gujarat, India
B.E. (Computer Engineering)
Gujarat Technological University
Gujarat, India
$ ls personal_projects/
Independent projects built during university and early career. These demonstrate my interest in security research and practical tool development.
Threat Detection & Analysis Tools
Tools for IP/port scanning, network speed monitoring, CnC server exploration, and TCP proxy with traffic logging. Built for security research and network analysis.
2019-2020
Real Time DNS Monitoring
Go tool to monitor DNS traffic and report frequently visited domains; insights into domain usage patterns and potential security threats.
2020
E-Commerce Product Review Scraper
Flask web app for product search, scraping Flipkart reviews, displaying results in a table; deployed using AWS services.
2019