How PayPal Solved Their Thundering Herd Problem with Jitter
Jan 15, 2026
Braintree's disputes processor faced a thundering herd. Exponential backoff wasn't enough—adding jitter to retry timing spread the load and resolved it.
Read more →$ whoami
Software Engineer by day. Still a software engineer by night. Curious, always learning, and chasing that 1% improvement every day.
Based in Earth
I’m a backend engineer with 3.7 years of experience building systems and APIs. Over the last few years, I’ve worked on real-world systems handling thousands of requests and integrations, where things don’t always go as planned (and that’s where most of the learning happens).
From reducing failure rates to chasing down production issues, I’ve spent a lot of time understanding how systems behave outside ideal conditions. I think in terms of trade-offs, not just what works, but what continues to work as systems scale.
Coffee fuels my day.
"There are no solutions, only trade-offs."
Email: itskiranmp@gmail.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/kiran-m-p
Open to opportunities
A collection of technical explorations, engineering blog summaries, and my learnings from the field. Filter by tags to find relevant topics.
Jan 15, 2026
Braintree's disputes processor faced a thundering herd. Exponential backoff wasn't enough—adding jitter to retry timing spread the load and resolved it.
Read more →Aug 15, 2025
Validating inputs earlier in a function instead of nesting them in main logic. Defensive programming for cleaner, safer code.
Read more →Jul 15, 2025
A 64-bit unique ID generated without coordination. Time-ordered, highly performant, and perfect for scalable systems.
Read more →