About
Akhil Vij
Staff engineer, previously at Agoda and Informatica (Salesforce)
Who I am
I'm a full-stack engineer with 13 years of experience.
From 2024 to 2026 I was a Staff Software Engineer at Agoda, on the white-label platform team. We ran more than 30 partner travel portals from one shared platform, powering more than $230M in annual revenue. I automated partner onboarding, which took us from 3 or 4 partners to more than 30 and cut an enterprise launch from about 90 days to 15 days.
From 2018 to 2024 I was a Principal Software Engineer at Informatica (now part of Salesforce). I was a founding engineer of Droplets, its React and TypeScript design system, which grew to 45 components used by more than 25 products. I also drove the company-wide push to make those products meet WCAG 2.1 AA.
I studied computer science at IIIT Hyderabad (B.Tech Honors and MS by Research).
Why behindscale
Most engineers never get to run a system at real scale, yet system design interviews expect practical knowledge of running one. The best record of what happens at scale is in companies' own engineering write-ups: what broke, what they changed, and what it cost them. These posts are full of valuable lessons, but they're scattered, and I couldn't find any product that compares them across companies.
I built behindscale so you can learn from real engineering write-ups, and see how different companies solved the same problem with different trade-offs.
How lessons are made
The heart of behindscale is the problem page. Each one takes a single hard problem, like a queue that fails exactly when the backlog arrives, and the companies that wrote about hitting it. You cause the failure yourself in a small simulation, then build a design that survives a day of traffic. After that you compare your choices with what each company actually did and what it cost them. Each problem page ends with the follow-up questions an interviewer would ask.
I draft, write and edit every problem page myself. AI helps with research drafts and with building the simulations. Every claim is checked against the original posts, and the page links every post it uses. Each company's post also has its own breakdown page, linked from the problem page.
The simulations are simplified on purpose. They show the shape of a failure, not a copy of anyone's production system.
The rules
- First-party sources only. If the company didn't write it, it isn't evidence here.
- Every company's answer links to its original post, with the year it was written.
- When a post doesn't say something, the page says "not stated" instead of guessing.
Corrections
If something here is wrong, I want to know. Email hello@behindscale.com with the page name in the subject. I'll fix it and, if you'd like, credit you on the page.
Elsewhere
One real failure every two weeks
Why the companies that faced it chose differently, what each choice cost, and how you’d defend your own design.