Suraj Gopal

Background

About Suraj Gopal

I build and scale platforms that real people depend on. For the past 2 years, I've been the sole in-house engineer for the Scholastic Art & Writing Awards portal — a submission, judging, and announcement platform serving 200K+ users across the US and Canada. In that time, I've architected a zero-downtime migration of 13+ years of legacy data from DynamoDB to PostgreSQL, identified and eliminated $170K+ in annual AWS infrastructure waste, and built the modernization blueprint to move our public-facing site from legacy Gatsby to Next.js. I own features end-to-end — from stakeholder discovery and technical design through implementation, UAT, and release. Before engineering, I spent 11 years as a NYC public school teacher, including founding a Computer Science department that served 50+ students annually. I also contributed learning modules to Amazon's Project STEM: Introduction to Python, reaching students nationwide. My background is the primary reason I think about systems differently. I default to asking "what problem are we actually solving?" before writing a line of code, and I communicate technical tradeoffs in language that non-technical stakeholders can act on. This is of prime importance when your user base heavily includes both teenagers and public educators used to outdated, low functioning technology. I'm looking for my next role as a backend-leaning full stack engineer at a company scaling something interesting. I want to architect features, own infrastructure decisions, and work with a team that ships fast and cares about what they're building. Stack: TypeScript, NestJS, Next.js, Node.js, React, Java, Spring Boot, PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, AWS (S3, Lambda, EC2, RDS, CloudWatch)