Vol. 01 — The Engineer's Issue№ 2026 / 05

Feature

Engineering for the
things people
actually use.

I'm Rishabh Gupta — a Senior Software Engineer on Meta's Instagram Ads Delivery Platform, working on performance, privacy-first architecture, and brand safety at a scale where "edge case" still means millions of impressions. Previously at Cohesity and CenturyLink, building streaming ETL, anomaly detection and the unglamorous plumbing that keeps things upright.

12+

years shipping production software

1B+

daily ad impressions on systems he helps run

70+

technical design docs authored at Meta

Chapter I

What I actually do, day to day.

The work splits into three rough buckets — none of them glamorous, all of them load-bearing.

First, brand-safety systems at Meta: making sure ads don't show up next to content advertisers don't want to be associated with, across Instagram and Threads, at a scale where "edge case" still means millions of impressions.

Second, streaming data pipelines — Kafka, Spark, real-time ETL, the kind that gets paged when a customer's cluster starts misbehaving at 3 a.m.

Third, the boring multipliers: automation frameworks, simulation-based capacity planners, mentoring new grads into the codebase so they ship something real in week two.

The Stack

17 tools · in rotation

Python.Golang.Hack.Java.Spark.Kafka.gRPC.Simpy.AWS.Sagemaker.Kubernetes.GCP.Postgres.Snowflake.BigQuery.Elastic.Redis.
"Most of the interesting work happens in the seams — between teams, between systems, between what users say and what they do."

Turn the page

Continue to the work →