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Mahesh Gudladona

@maheshgudladona

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Staff backend engineer building distributed systems and AI developer tooling—shipping remote-ready products.

India

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What I'm looking for

I’m looking for remote Staff Backend or Founding Engineer work where I can design scalable distributed systems, lead delivery and reviews, and ship AI-powered tooling/products end-to-end.

I’m a Staff/Founding Engineer focused on backend and distributed systems, with 14+ years writing backend systems across healthcare data, real estate, and early-stage AI. At Opendoor, I designed Hamlet for internal listings operations—saving roughly $2M/year—and led system design, technical strategy, and design/code reviews on the Listings team.

I’ve also shipped products end-to-end: I built the Lighthouse MVP solo and took it through to a real pilot at UMD Smith School. While I look for remote work, I’m actively shipping indie AI developer tooling—publishing a VS Code extension, Claude Code plugins, an MCP app, and a course on self-hosted coding assistants.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Indie Hacker (AI Tools)

Self-Directed

Jan 2026 - May 2026 (4 months)

Built and published five AI developer tooling projects, including a VS Code extension, two Claude Code plugins, an MCP app, and a course on self-hosted coding assistants.

TypeScript VS Code Extension API Claude Code OpenAI API Prompt Engineering VLLM Tailscale SQLite Documentation

Founding Engineer

Lighthouse

Apr 2025 - Nov 2025 (7 months)

Built the Lighthouse MVP solo, including a Chrome extension, Google Meet integration for meeting notes, Postgres schema, and OpenAI API wiring, then shipped the first external deployment as a mentorship-matching pilot at UMD Smith School.

OpenAI API Postgres Python TypeScript React Chrome extensions Google Meet System Integration

Staff Software Engineer

Opendoor

Jul 2022 - Mar 2025 (2 years 8 months)

Designed Hamlet for internal listings operations, owning design and driving implementation decisions that saved roughly $2M/year (~2bps cost) and led listings performance work delivering about 3x improvements on the consumer surface.

Go Python AWS Terraform GraphQL Postgres Distributed Systems Microservices CI CD

Principal Software Engineer

Optum

Apr 2012 - Jul 2022 (10 years 3 months)

Led analytics web apps, data pipelines, and platform initiatives over multiple promotions, including mentoring/hiring and on-call incident response responsibilities for production systems.