Engineering Stories
Twenty years of building systems across high-frequency trading, classical music technology, emergency healthcare, and industrial automation. These are the stories that don't fit on a resume.
This is a working engineer's blog — not a thought-leadership newsletter, not a hot-takes feed, and not a tutorial site. Every essay is built on something I shipped, broke, or rebuilt with my own hands. The stories are deliberately specific: the exact trading venue, the actual edge case, the line of code that broke at 03:14 in production.
If you're a senior engineer, an engineering leader, a hiring manager, or a recruiter who is trying to figure out what someone with a 20-year career across market making, music technology, and life-critical healthcare software actually knows how to do — this is the long-form version of the answer.
New essays every two weeks. Subscribe via RSS · follow on LinkedIn · or read what I'm working on right now.
Trading Infrastructure
Exchange connectivity at IMC, 90+ trading venues, FIX protocol implementation, and what most engineers get wrong when they first hear the words "low latency."
Apple Acquisition
The origin story of Apple Music Classical — and why the Primephonic metadata database we built was different enough from every other music catalog that Apple acquired the whole company to get it.
Classical Music Metadata
How we turned 1,399 pages of printed classical music compositions into a searchable database — and why OCR, hand-tuned heuristics, and a lot of domain knowledge were the only way through.
High-Frequency Trading
Goldman Sachs reconciliation systems, the ETF desk launch, and eight years of building infrastructure where a single bug costs more than most software engineers earn in a decade.
Healthcare & Patents
The two years I spent building emergency radiology workflow software — and what it taught me about what software is actually for when the stakes are a human life.
Career
From industrial automation to trading floors to Apple Music. What crossing industry boundaries actually teaches you — and why the skills that transfer are never the ones you expect.
Mentoring
Cambridge University interns, the questions they ask that I can't answer, and why experience without transmission is just accumulation.
Every two weeks, occasionally weekly when a story is fresh. The RSS feed always has the latest. Cross-posts hit dev.to, Medium, Hashnode, and LinkedIn within 48 hours of the canonical version going live here.
Conversation happens on LinkedIn, on the Hacker News submissions, and via direct email. That's where readers actually engage. A comments section on a personal site is mostly spam by week three.
Yes, with attribution — please link back to the canonical URL on arindampaul.com. For full reposts on a publication, ping me at arindam.paul@me.com first — happy to provide a clean copy with your house style.
No. This is a single-author site. If you want to write about something I've worked on, I'm happy to talk on background or be quoted — email me.