About

I'm Sulav Raj Bista, a software engineer in Brisbane, AU. I like the unglamorous parts of the job — the system that quietly handles peak traffic at 2am, the onboarding flow that stops being a support ticket, the alert that fires before a customer notices. Most of my career has been about owning a hard problem end to end, and being the person other teams escalate to when it matters.

I grew up in Nepal and went to India for my engineering degree, then spent my early career in Bangalore building fintech and SaaS products — improving OCR pipelines and shipping payment services at Fyle, then leading backend work back home in Lalitpur. For the last several years I owned a payments-and-compliance module at Paylocity, holding it to 99.99% reliability as it grew. Along the way I've shipped things solo too: a municipal tax SaaS in Nepal and a privacy-first browser toolkit. Now I'm in Brisbane, looking for the next team to do that kind of work with.

Journey

Jul 2021 — Mar 2026
Senior Software Engineer· Paylocity
Technical owner of the Vendor Management module - auth, onboarding, tax compliance, and payments — held to 99.99% success at p95 < 700ms.
Nov 2020 — Jul 2021
Lead Software Developer· Revv Inc
Built and scaled a high-traffic Flask backend on AWS for dynamic ad-publishing portals serving multiple client portals.
Feb 2019 — Oct 2020
Software Development Engineer II· Fyle Inc
Lifted OCR receipt-classification accuracy from 35% to 95% and shipped a secure ACH payment service with micro-deposit verification.
Jun 2018 — Jan 2019
Software Engineer· Odessa Technologies
Delivered client-facing features and resolved production issues on a legacy financial platform within Agile cycles.

How I work

— Boring, reliable systems beat clever, fragile ones.
— Write the code the next engineer can read at 2am.
— Ship, measure, then optimise — in that order.
— Own the problem end to end, not just the ticket.

Right now

I'm based in Brisbane with full working rights in Australia, and open to senior backend or full-stack roles — ideally a team that cares about reliability and lets engineers own real problems end to end. I'm happy working remotely or on-site. Reach me at [email protected] or see my resume.