Nikhil Padala

Infrastructure for systems that move money.

Fifteen years keeping trading platforms, exchanges and custody systems alive in production. Available for contract engagements.

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FlexTrade / Gemini / Akuna Capital / Upside / Pex

15 yrs
production infrastructure
99.99%
exchange uptime at Gemini
$500M+
digital assets protected, zero incidents in 16 months
3x
founding infrastructure engineer

The talk

Hesitation is data.

TEDx talk on why the strongest reliability signal in your organization is the one nobody writes down. On intuition, blind spots, and why five engineers who trained the same way are not redundancy.

What I do

Contract engagements

Embedded on your infrastructure team. Linux performance, reliability, platform, security. Trading systems, exchanges, custody, market data. Remote, or on-site in Dubai, London and New York. Available now.

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Reliability and security audit

A fixed-scope review of your production infrastructure: failure modes, single points of failure, key custody, incident readiness, audit evidence. Written findings, prioritized, with the fixes ranked by cost. Two weeks.

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Fractional infrastructure lead

Ongoing. Architecture, hiring bar, on-call and runbook design, compliance readiness. For teams that need senior infrastructure judgment without a full-time hire.

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Selected work

  • Precision Time Protocol on Solarflare hardware at Gemini.

    Nanosecond-grade time synchronization underpinning matching engine fairness, regulatory compliance and audit trails.

  • Exchange SRE across the matching engine, market data and order entry paths.

    Incident command, postmortems with engineering leadership, and the runbooks and on-call processes that scaled the SRE function to 24/7 global coverage.

  • Founding crypto DevOps at Akuna Capital.

    Built and operated trading infrastructure across 12+ cryptocurrency exchanges. Same-AZ colocation discovery through mass benchmarking, keeping the lowest-jitter hosts as production. Founded and scaled the DevOps function from zero to three.

  • HSM-backed custody at Upside.

    Operational security for wallet infrastructure, multi-sig approval workflows and audit-grade logging. $500M+ protected, zero security incidents in 16 months.

  • SOC 2 Type II and MiFID II at FlexTrade.

    Established the compliance frameworks for institutional trading infrastructure and passed every regulatory audit. Led a four-engineer team across 1500+ Linux systems and 5 global sites.

  • TEE-based signing on AWS Nitro Enclaves.

    Attestation wired into CI: every commit rebuilds, re-measures and re-attests, with deployment gated on measurement match. Keys generated inside the enclave and never leaving it.

About

I've spent fifteen years keeping production systems alive in places where downtime is measured in money: institutional trading platforms at FlexTrade, exchange operations at Gemini, founding crypto DevOps at Akuna Capital, digital asset custody at Upside. Different systems, same standard: the platform stays up, the keys stay safe, the audit trail holds.

What I actually do is find the failure mode before it finds you. Sometimes it's technical: a single point of failure in the market data path, a key that lives outside the HSM, a runbook that assumes its author is awake. Sometimes it's organizational: five engineers who trained the same way and share the same blind spot. The talk above is about the second kind.

I'm based in Dubai and work with teams in the US, UK, EU and UAE. I invoice through a UAE entity or a US LLC, and I can work through an employer of record if that's simpler for your finance team.

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Thirty minutes, no preparation needed. Email me a line about your company, what you're working on, and your timeline, and I'll reply with times.

Email padalan@gmail.com
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