Block printing platform. Downtime went from 9 h to under 5 min a year.
Profile
Rishabh Malhotra
Staff Software Engineer at eBay Live
Multi-region, high scale & low-latency systems.
I build distributed systems that keep working even when a region goes down.
- Focus
- Distributed systems
- Education
- Comp Sci Hons, UWaterloo
Global traffic
Production metrics
Multi-region design for the Tier-0 printing platform at Square.
Reads and writes per second, across regions.
Authenticates 100% of Uber Eats traffic into Square. Zero production incidents.
Notable Impact
-
Backend for live-stream auctions and shopping, where the video, the bid clock and the ledger have to agree in real time.
Details coming- org
- eBay
- since
- 2026
- status
- provisioning
-
Tier-0 platform that prints order tickets for Uber Eats, DoorDash, Postmates and Cash App sellers. Wrote the foundational DynamoDB data model as a polymorphic schema serving 8 access patterns, and exploited Temporal for durable job execution and Kafka to serve as feeds.
- availability
- 99.9%→99.999%
- downtime / yr
- 9 h→< 5 min
- failover
- < 800 ms
- revenue protected
- $100Ms / yr
-
Engineering DRI for Uber Eats auth for all sellers on Square. Wrote the designs, worked directly with Uber's engineering team and built the OAuth 2.0 flows. Authenticates 100% of Uber Eats traffic into Square at 4K QPS, with zero production incidents.
- throughput
- 4K QPS
- authenticated
- 100% of Uber Eats traffic
- prod incidents
- 0
- fulfillment-autoscalingHorizontal autoscaling took SLO adherence from 96% to 99.7%.
- localization-engineAdopted by 7 commerce services. New-country launches went from 60+ weeks to under 15.
- Cross-org SEV0 postmortemLed a cross-organization SEV0 incident response. The postmortem and root cause analysis was recognized as Square's official template for all future engineering postmortems.
Event log
- deployJoined eBay as Staff SWE building eBay Live
- promoteSenior Software Engineer, Square
- deployJoined Square (Block)Software Engineer
- deployLightspeed CommerceGo services handling 10M events a day
- releaseHons. BCS, University of WaterlooDean's Honours
- deployCredit Karma, internScala audit-log service on CQRS
- deployIBM Watson, internPlanning Analytics APIs, CNN image pipelines
Docs
When I'm not building software I write about astrodynamics, mostly to advance my understanding of how to increase mass to orbit. I believe that fundamentally the only thing that matters is advancing civilization on the Kardashev scale, and the primary limiting pre-requisite for that is mass to orbit.
- The Tyranny of the Rocket EquationWhy rockets are fundamentally hard: Tsiolkovsky's equation and its unforgiving exponential nature.Jul 2025 · 7 min readpublished
- Rocket Propulsion: From Newton's Laws to Starship's RaptorEngine cycles, the methane bet, full-flow staged combustion and what reusability really costs.Jan 2025 · 7 min readpublished
Endpoints
- GET/email[email protected]200
- GET/linkedinin/rishmalho200
- GET/githubrishabhmalhotra200
- GET/x@rishmalho200
- GET/nostrprimal.net/npub1gxun…200
- GET/photographyunsplash.com/@rishmalho200