Abhinav Agarwal

Nine years in. Most of that time on the unglamorous parts of distributed systems: the operator surface, the control plane, the observability pipeline, the disaster recovery story that someone hopes to never have to use.

I like building teams from scratch. I was the first engineer for Confluent's Connect org in India, and I'm now doing the same for Roblox's data engineering function here. The early years of a team set the ceiling for everything that comes after, and I find that part of the work genuinely interesting.

Lately I'm spending a lot of time on how conversational AI fits into operational data tooling. Systems where the question "what changed last Tuesday?" currently requires three dashboards and a Slack search.