I build products from scratch. Since November 2024 I’ve been Founding Engineer at Pre6.ai, where I’ve taken product from zero to one - core systems, UI, landing page, target market research, building tech teams, positioning. The whole stack.

I believe code and design must be shaped by market forces - you can’t architect in a vacuum. The best systems emerge from tight feedback loops with real users, not from grand upfront designs.

What I Do

These days I write mathematical and numerical software, in Rust, and make it fast. Computational geometry, fluid solvers (CFD - lattice-Boltzmann, free-surface, thermal), finite element methods, GPU kernels - the kind of code where correctness is a numerical question and performance is the difference between a tool people use and a tool people wait on.

That work sits somewhere between three things I like doing: reading the mathematics until I actually understand the method, implementing it so it doesn’t fall over on real inputs, and then profiling it until it’s quick. I’m comfortable across that whole range - deriving a discretisation, writing the CUDA kernel for it, and arguing about cache lines afterwards.

Before that, I built data pipelines, a distributed SQL query engine, and various systems that needed to be lean and fast. I’ve been programming since I was 9, shipping professionally since 2017.

Philosophy: Unix + TIGER_STYLE + Hard-Mode Rust. No bloat.

Current Obsessions

Mathematics: Working through Fermat’s Last Theorem, elliptic curves, modular forms, and hyperbolic manifolds. Not for applications - pure obsession with deep structure.

Systems: Compilers (MLIR), concurrent programming, and how far you can push a numerical kernel before the hardware stops cooperating.

Open Source

I maintain raft-rs - an async Raft implementation with zero-copy storage. Built taper, an autograd engine with SIMD-optimized ops.

Contributor to SGLang (LLM serving framework), Apache Datafusion-Comet (Spark accelerator in Rust), Arroyo (stream processing), Apache Iceberg-rust, and others.

Teaching

I teach Rust, Distributed Systems, and OS at Empowered Coder. Former visiting faculty at Fergusson College. I speak at Rust meetups in Pune, Bangalore, and Mumbai.

Background

Mathematics degree (University of Pune), PG Diploma in AI/ML (IIIT Bangalore). The math background shapes how I think about systems - proofs before code.

Get in touch

vaibhaw [dot] vipul [at] gmail [dot] com