Sarthak Shah

backend / distributed systems engineer

I was most recently a Founding Engineer at MetEngine .

I love working with financial systems, game theory and mechanism design. You'll find me building elaborate backend systems, smart contracts, and low-latency distributed infra.

I enjoy participating in hackathons and have won ~20 of them. Also, in my free time, I obsess over cameras, drones, and bikes.

Links: [LinkedIn] [Twitter] [GitHub] [Resume]

Work

MetEngine — founding engineer

june 2025 – sept 2026

(backed by colosseum, balaji srinivasan & monke foundry)

researched, designed and implemented protocols across amms, liquidity providing, lending & borrowing, yield-bearing vaults, perps, and launchpads
owned the trading terminal ($114m in volume) end to end: parsing (manual, codama, carbon), indexing (yellowstone grpc), backfills (jetstreamer firehose), backend (axum), transport (kafka), storage (clickhouse, postgres), and infra + deployments + observability (aws, ci/cd)
shipped the chrome extension: 2.2k users in 3 weeks, 90 paid

Gasyard — software developer

jan 2025 – may 2025

co-built the backend, handling $570k volume across 120k requests in 5 months
contributed integrations from scratch for hyperliquid, movement, monad, and other evm/non-evm chains, often pre-sdk on the newer ones
created fuelbae, an ai agent executing defi actions across aave, uniswap, hyperliquid, and curve

0rbit (acq. by forward research) — software developer

mar 2024 – dec 2024

one of the first 10 builders on AO in its earliest days
contributed to the lua contracts behind 0rbit's oracle, the first protocol live on AO, bringing price feeds, data feeds and any api onto arweave's actor-oriented compute layer
tested the node pre-launch, surfacing edge cases and stability issues before mainnet
wrote 4 developer blogs with working demo apps to onboard new builders

& 6x freelance clients — mostly backend & protocol eng.

Projects

rust projects

gossip-toy

built a complete peer-to-peer gossip network in rust over udp, implementing solana's pull/push protocol, crds replication, liveness detection (ping/pong), and binary message serialization
implemented bloom filter–based anti-entropy synchronization and timestamp-based conflict resolution, enabling efficient state reconciliation while minimizing redundant network traffic
designed a multi-threaded peer-to-peer system where nodes converge to a consistent replicated state using crds, bloom filter anti-entropy synchronization, and udp-based pull/push gossip

aqua

built a rust load generator on tokio that drives solana json-rpc nodes at fixed request rates with semaphore-bounded concurrency, recording throughput, error rate and p50/p90/p95/p99 latency in an hdr histogram, across 40+ rpc methods with stress, spike and soak modes
implemented geyser grpc benchmarking that subscribes to two yellowstone endpoints concurrently and measures per-slot delivery latency between them, with account subscription filtering
added differential testing that issues the same calls to multiple nodes and reports response mismatches, plus json and interactive html reports for every run

pinocchio squads v4

rewrote the squads v4 multisig (the multisig behind most solana treasuries) in native pinocchio with all 35 instructions and 10 account types, covering threshold voting, time locks, spending limits, batch transactions and rent reclamation
implemented arbitrary cpi execution through vault pdas with invoke_signed, resolving up to 8 address lookup tables and 64 account keys per message, plus a transaction buffer path for messages larger than one instruction
structured it as an on-chain program plus a shared interface crate of layouts, seeds and errors, so clients compile against the same state definitions as the program

nock

architected a per-maker order book on solana where each market maker owns an independent pda, eliminating write contention and enabling concurrent quote updates under sealevel's parallel execution model
implemented an on-chain quote freshness mechanism that automatically expires stale quotes using slot-based liveness checks without requiring external keepers
built a native pinocchio-based solana program with deterministic fixed-size account layouts and optimized binary size for low compute overhead

resolut

built a native pinocchio (no_std) solana program with 39 instructions across assertion, dispute, staking, voting, policy and emergency paths, with deterministic account layouts and pda seeds
implemented the optimistic assertion flow: a claim posted with a bond settles as true after a slot-based liveness window unless disputed; a dispute escrows a matching bond and escalates to the court
implemented a staked dispute court with sha-256 commit-reveal voting, per-voter stake, reputation and reward pdas, and slashing of the losing side on resolution

anchor turbin3 — minimal solana programs built during turbin3 builders' cohort

typescript projects

solver engine

fill-then-settle solver in typescript over real uniswap v2 and v3 pools on 7 chains: create2-derived pool addresses, pool state replayed from swap/mint/burn/sync logs, gas measured from receipts on anvil forks, signed fills
uniswap v2 and v3 swap math exact to the wei against quoterv2; quote path at 0.87 ms and 7.3k quotes/s at p99 10 ms on one process
order lifecycle as an idempotent state machine with refunds, payout retries, stray-deposit sweeping, restart recovery from chain logs, and a redis writer lease with fencing tokens against double-signing

predictify

built a typescript telegram bot (telegraf, webhook mode) for trading polymarket from chat: fok market orders, gtc limit orders, cancels, redemptions and allowance management through the polymarket clob client, with 2.5k+ users and $100k+ volume
ran two polymarket websocket watchers with auto-reconnect and redis-backed registrations for price alerts and limit-order fills, a 12-hourly cron notifier for high-probability markets by subscribed category, and every order published to aws sqs for downstream processing
integrated mayan and debridge so users fund from solana into polygon usdc in one flow, rendered pnl and position cards server-side with satori, shipped en/zh localisation, and deployed as a docker image to ec2 through github actions with staging and production pipelines

ticker

built a next.js 15 farcaster mini app where users buy and sell 20 tokenized rwas (tsla, nvda, aapl, msft, xgold and others) with any token on any chain, doing $10k+ in volume
routed every trade through bungee's cross-chain aggregator: quotes fetched on debounced input, executed as an erc20 approval plus an eip-712 signed order on the returned route, across base, polygon and gnosis
wired farcaster's frame sdk and manifest for in-feed launch, privy with wagmi/viem for wallets, and zustand stores for token, quote and bridge state

closecode

built a terminal coding agent in typescript on bun with an opentui interface and a hono api streaming anthropic and openai models through the ai sdk. a model is one shared catalogue entry (id, provider, pricing) that drives validation, the picker, provider resolution and billing; a new provider is one compiler-enforced switch case
designed a split agent loop: the server owns the model, prompt, tool contracts and session transcript; the cli executes every tool call locally and posts results back, so source code never leaves the machine. plan and build modes are enforced on both sides
added clerk oauth with pkce, session transcripts in postgres, and usage-metered billing with token usage priced into credits, ingested into polar and gated by a balance check

curators

fastify + typescript backend with prisma on postgresql that ranks every sanctum lst by apy and, on each sol deposit, auto-swaps into the top lst through jupiter v6
designed mev-protected execution: the jupiter swap is decompiled, a treasury fee instruction appended, then sent as a jito bundle when the next leader is within 10 slots, tipping at the 75th-percentile landed tip across 5 block engines; otherwise falls back to a plain rpc send with a fresh blockhash
wallet-based jwt auth with per-user authorization on all 16 endpoints, and portfolio accounting with weighted-average entry price and realized/unrealized profit in sol