Dhiraj(Raj)Jha

Systems Engineer  ·  Nashville, TN  ·  open to work

As an engineering student focused on systems software, backend infrastructure, and automation, I have worked on engineering automation at Google, legacy-data migration at Vanderbilt, and distributed systems projects in Go, C++, and Python. I am interested in software that has real constraints: correctness, reliability, latency, failure recovery, and maintainability.

Dhiraj Jha
Scroll

About

Who Am I?

I am interested in the parts of computing where software has to work with real constraints: hardware behavior, network boundaries, latency, reliability, and failure. That interest became more concrete after interning on an SRE team at Google, where I got closer to the infrastructure side of software and saw how much engineering goes into keeping systems dependable.

Since then, I have been building more distributed systems projects, mostly in Go and C++. Those are the languages I am most comfortable with, and I have used them for over a year across production and project work. I also spend a lot of time with computer networking and lower-level systems, including a backend that connects smart refrigerators to online grocery platforms.

As of now, I am more focused on building a strong grasp of fundamentals, trying not to reach for frameworks while developing backend systems. As most systems engineers, I mostly avoid abstractions and delve deep into structures and systems.

Disciplines

  • Distributed Systems
  • Network Engineering
  • Infrastructure & SRE
  • Backend Architecture
  • Systems Automation
  • Linux Internals

Currently

Building offtofly, a constraint solver for travel planning

Technical Skills

Tech Stack

What I reach for when building production systems.

GoC/C++PythonPostgreSQLMongoDBRedisLinuxDistributed SystemsConcurrencygRPC/RPCMessage QueuesGoC/C++PythonPostgreSQLMongoDBRedisLinuxDistributed SystemsConcurrencygRPC/RPCMessage Queues
TCP/IPHTTP/SWebSocketsSTUN/ICEmTLSPKIDockerKubernetesTerraformAWSGitTCP/IPHTTP/SWebSocketsSTUN/ICEmTLSPKIDockerKubernetesTerraformAWSGit

Work History

Experience

Building real systems across industry and research.

Vanderbilt University

Vanderbilt University

Current

Software Developer Intern

Apr 2026 - Present Nashville, Tennessee

Five years of sensitive Tier 3 data was trapped in a legacy system, scattered across PDFs, scanned files, and Word documents, and it needed to migrate to a modern third-party platform (Onsite Systems) without loss or corruption. The data had no consistent structure, and most of it couldn't move without being digitized first. I built an ETL pipeline using a multi-engine parser (PyMuPDF and pdfplumber running in parallel) with automated divergence flagging for when their outputs disagreed. For unstructured anomalies the parsers couldn't confidently resolve, I integrated a locally-hosted Llama 3 instance via Ollama, which kept sensitive data off external networks. The pipeline normalizes everything into JSON/YAML payloads structured for the vendor's strict API schema. Manual data entry was cut by 90%.

Google

Google

Software Developer Intern, SRE Team

May 2025 - Aug 2025 Sunnyvale, California

Google's PRICE (Production Risks in Core Engineering) program periodically assesses system health across production infrastructure, but every cycle was entirely manual. Each assessment took around three days and required engineers to handle emailing, reporting, and bug tracking by hand. I was tasked with automating it end to end. I built PRICELess, a tool that orchestrates Google Workspace APIs to handle all communication and reporting automatically, and layered in a RAG pipeline that grounds LLM outputs in SRE principles so assessment reports come out standardized and citation-backed rather than freeform. I also built an auto-authentication service using LOAS to resolve the cross-service permission failures breaking calls between microservices. In the end, assessment time dropped from three days to fifteen minutes, and every previously manual step was eliminated.

offtofly

offtofly

Founder

Founder & Lead Engineer

Aug 2025 - Present Nashville, Tennessee

No existing travel tool generates a complete, optimized itinerary deterministically. They surface options, not answers. Offtofly is built to solve that. I am leading a five-person engineering team building the system from scratch as distributed microservices in Go, Python, and C++, communicating over REST and gRPC. The core is a custom graph database engine that models experiences as nodes with typed edges like location, timing, pace, and budget, so the constraint solver can compose valid itineraries without delegating the planning logic to an LLM.

FlashFS

A distributed filesystem I am building

One shared folder that lives on your own machines, mounted on every laptop, with files moving directly between them and never sitting on anyone's cloud.

What it is

Sharing files across many machines usually means handing your data to a cloud drive, or stitching together manual transfers that never behave like real files. I built FlashFS to do neither. It turns a set of machines, your own laptops or a team's, into one filesystem mounted at /mnt/flashfs that behaves like a normal folder, while every byte stays on the machines you own.

How I built it

I designed the cloud as a thin coordinator that holds only metadata, the directory tree and which machine holds which chunk, and never a single file byte. Files are split into content-addressed chunks that move directly between machines, peer to peer, over mutually authenticated connections. Lost copies rebuild themselves, and machines behind NAT reach each other through hole-punching, so it works across home networks and continents rather than a single LAN.

What sets it apart

What I wanted was something that is, at once, a real mounted filesystem, fully peer to peer so bytes never touch the cloud, self-healing, and able to work across the open internet.

The cloud only coordinates. The storage, the bandwidth, and the data stay with you.

Work Samples

More Projects

Distributed and concurrent systems.

01 Jan 2026 - Mar 2026

AutoGrocery

IoT Smart Fridge Platform

The idea was to attach smart refrigerators to online grocery platforms. The fridge detects what's running low and triggers an order automatically, including real-time dispatch to a warehouse robot for fulfillment. I structured four Go microservices covering ordering, inventory, pricing, and analytics, all communicating over gRPC to keep inter-service latency low. Warehouse robot dispatch runs on ZeroMQ pub-sub so events push immediately when an order clears. A REST API Gateway sits in front for auth, order history, and payment. It is the external-facing surface for users and third-party integrations.

GogRPCZeroMQMicroservicesRESTIoT
02 Dec 2025 - Jan 2026

Bluetooth AudioSync

Multi-Speaker Sync Engine

Bluetooth A2DP gives you no native mechanism to synchronize playback across multiple speakers. Each device runs its own clock and they drift apart almost immediately. I built AudioSync in C++ to fix that. The tool runs concurrent playback pipelines with timestamped buffering across devices, estimates the clock offset between each speaker and a reference, and applies latency compensation to keep them aligned in real time. The result is tight, audible synchronization across a multi-speaker setup with no hardware modifications.

C++Bluetooth A2DPConcurrencyReal-Time SystemsClock Sync

Academic Background

Education

A rigorous foundation in computer science, mathematics, and engineering.

Fisk University

Aug 2024 - May 2028

Fisk University

Nashville, TN

Computer Science (B.S.)

Mathematics (B.A.)

  • Presidential · Scholar
  • Vice President · Fisk Mathematics Club

CourseworkTheory of Computation, Java, Python, Quantum Computation, Statistics, Linear Algebra, Discrete Mathematics, Ordinary Differential Equations & 3 more

Vanderbilt University

Jan 2025 - Present

Vanderbilt University

Nashville, TN

Computer Engineering (Coursework)

CourseworkProgram Design & Algorithms, Multivariable Calculus, Intermediate Software Design, Algorithms, Computer Networking

Xavier International College

2021 - 2023

Xavier International College

Kathmandu, Nepal

Cambridge International AS & A Levels

  • Founding President · Xavier STEM Club (XSC)
  • A+ · Scholarship
  • Finalist · Nepal Olympiad in Informatics 2022
  • Semifinalist · Nepal Mathematical Olympiad 2022

CourseworkA Level Physics, A Level Mathematics, A Level Chemistry, A Level Further Mathematics, A Level Computer Science

Beyond the Code

7 Countries.

One Nepali Passport.

7

Countries

50+

Cities

3

Continents

01

International Student

Nepal to Nashville is $1,200 and three connections on a good day. Every trip home is a financial equation before it is a reunion. You learn to find routes nobody else would look for, the ones with a six-hour layover in Doha that cut the price in half.

02

The Opportunity Hunt

Bahrain because it was visa-on-arrival and cheap. The Philippines because a friend had a spare room. Turkey because the layover made the connection cheaper than any direct route. A Nepali passport teaches you to find the opening nobody else looked for.

03

The Tools Are Broken

Every trip planned across twenty tabs, four apps, and a notes file that falls apart the moment a price changes. The platforms are built for blue passports and fat wallets. The rest of us improvise. That is where offtofly started.

This is where offtofly started.

Founded 2025

offtofly››

Plan it right. Keep it alive.

offtofly.com

We live on a planet of extraordinary things. Mountains, coasts, old cities, faces we have never met, meals we have never tasted. We are born into it. Most of us leave it having seen almost none of it. Not because we did not want to. Because nobody made the planning simple enough to actually follow through.

Give me a perfect maintainable itinerary and I will travel the world.

Said nobody. Because nobody built it. Until now.

Jake spent a week near Chicago. His favorite artist played a show there that same week. He found out the day after it ended, scattered across 23 browser tabs with no single source connecting the dots. Maya had six days of spring break and a tight budget. A perfect combination of cheap flights and free stays existed. Nobody surfaced it in time.

Planning a trip today means bouncing between booking sites, airline apps, maps, and a notes file that falls apart the moment anything changes. One rescheduled flight and the whole itinerary collapses. There is no tool that recovers it for you. There is no single place that holds your trip together.

offtofly treats a trip as what it actually is: a chain of connected decisions where one change ripples through everything. It finds the plan that fits you. When the plan breaks, it fixes it. For the retiree on his first trip to Japan. For the student with six days and almost no money. For anyone who ever thought they could not afford to see more of this planet.

I believe travel should not be a luxury. This planet is everyone's home, and we deserve to know it better before we ultimately depart from here.

Plan it right. Keep it alive.

Get in touch

Let's talk.

Open to internships, collaboration on projects, and good conversations.

jhadhiraj147@gmail.com