About Me

Hey! I'm Rishav Kumar — a software engineer based in Austin, TX. I grew up in India and moved to the United States at 18 to pursue my Bachelor's degree in Computer Science at Arizona State University. Moving countries alone to chase something you're passionate about is equal parts terrifying and exciting — I wouldn't trade it for anything. Those years in Tempe shaped how I think, how I work, and honestly, who I am.

During my undergrad I interned at Visa twice, building synthetic monitoring systems and real-time data pipelines with Kafka and Druid. I stayed at ASU for my Master's, and joined Visa full-time after graduating. I'm now a Senior Software Engineer working on AI-driven observability platforms — building real-time alert resolution and notification systems for on-call teams to resolve incidents as efficiently as possible, AI agents that run health checks on servers and automatically detect problems before anyone notices, and a lot of Angular and Node.js work connecting it all together.

Outside of work, I play guitar and sing — mostly when nobody's listening, sometimes when they are. I started playing back in India and it's been with me through every big life transition. I also love cooking, which I picked up seriously after moving to the US. What started as survival cooking has turned into something I genuinely look forward to. There's something meditative about it — not unlike debugging, but tastier.

This blog is where I write about software engineering, distributed systems, system design, and personal finance. The finance part is something I wish someone had taught me earlier — nobody hands you a manual when you move to a new country and start earning. I'm figuring it out as I go and writing about it along the way. If something here is useful to you, that's a good day.