Sarthak Shah
backend / smart contract engineer
I was most recently a Founding Engineer at MetEngine .
I love working with financial systems, game theory and mechanism design. You'll find me building elaborate backend systems, smart contracts, and low-latency distributed infra.
I enjoy participating in hackathons and have won ~20 of them. Also, in my free time, I obsess over cameras, drones, and bikes.
Links: [LinkedIn] [Twitter] [GitHub] [Resume]

Work
MetEngine — founding engineer
june 2025 – sept 2026(backed by colosseum, balaji srinivasan & monke foundry)
- researched, designed and implemented protocols across amms, liquidity providing, lending & borrowing, yield-bearing vaults, perps, and launchpads
- owned the trading terminal ($114m in volume) end to end: parsing (manual, codama, carbon), indexing (yellowstone grpc), backfills (jetstreamer firehose), backend (axum), transport (kafka), storage (clickhouse, postgres), and infra + deployments + observability (aws, ci/cd)
- shipped the chrome extension: 2.2k users in 3 weeks, 90 paid
Gasyard — software developer
jan 2025 – may 2025- co-built the backend, handling $570k volume across 120k requests in 5 months
- contributed integrations from scratch for hyperliquid, movement, monad, and other evm/non-evm chains, often pre-sdk on the newer ones
- created fuelbae, an ai agent executing defi actions across aave, uniswap, hyperliquid, and curve
0rbit (acq. by forward research) — software developer
mar 2024 – dec 2024- one of the first 10 builders on AO in its earliest days
- contributed to the lua contracts behind 0rbit's oracle, the first protocol live on AO, bringing price feeds, data feeds and any api onto arweave's actor-oriented compute layer
- tested the node pre-launch, surfacing edge cases and stability issues before mainnet
- wrote 4 developer blogs with working demo apps to onboard new builders
& 6x freelance clients — mostly backend & protocol eng.
Projects
- built a complete peer-to-peer gossip network in rust over udp, implementing solana's pull/push protocol, crds replication, liveness detection (ping/pong), and binary message serialization
- implemented bloom filter–based anti-entropy synchronization and timestamp-based conflict resolution, enabling efficient state reconciliation while minimizing redundant network traffic
- designed a multi-threaded peer-to-peer system where nodes converge to a consistent replicated state using crds, bloom filter anti-entropy synchronization, and udp-based pull/push gossip
- built a rust load generator on tokio that drives solana json-rpc nodes at fixed request rates with semaphore-bounded concurrency, recording throughput, error rate and p50/p90/p95/p99 latency in an hdr histogram, across 40+ rpc methods with stress, spike and soak modes
- implemented geyser grpc benchmarking that subscribes to two yellowstone endpoints concurrently and measures per-slot delivery latency between them, with account subscription filtering
- added differential testing that issues the same calls to multiple nodes and reports response mismatches, plus json and interactive html reports for every run
- rewrote the squads v4 multisig (the multisig behind most solana treasuries) in native pinocchio with all 35 instructions and 10 account types, covering threshold voting, time locks, spending limits, batch transactions and rent reclamation
- implemented arbitrary cpi execution through vault pdas with invoke_signed, resolving up to 8 address lookup tables and 64 account keys per message, plus a transaction buffer path for messages larger than one instruction
- structured it as an on-chain program plus a shared interface crate of layouts, seeds and errors, so clients compile against the same state definitions as the program
- architected a per-maker order book on solana where each market maker owns an independent pda, eliminating write contention and enabling concurrent quote updates under sealevel's parallel execution model
- implemented an on-chain quote freshness mechanism that automatically expires stale quotes using slot-based liveness checks without requiring external keepers
- built a native pinocchio-based solana program with deterministic fixed-size account layouts and optimized binary size for low compute overhead
- built a native pinocchio (no_std) solana program with 39 instructions across assertion, dispute, staking, voting, policy and emergency paths, with deterministic account layouts and pda seeds
- implemented the optimistic assertion flow: a claim posted with a bond settles as true after a slot-based liveness window unless disputed; a dispute escrows a matching bond and escalates to the court
- implemented a staked dispute court with sha-256 commit-reveal voting, per-voter stake, reputation and reward pdas, and slashing of the losing side on resolution
anchor turbin3 — minimal solana programs built during turbin3 builders' cohort
- fill-then-settle solver in typescript over real uniswap v2 and v3 pools on 7 chains: create2-derived pool addresses, pool state replayed from swap/mint/burn/sync logs, gas measured from receipts on anvil forks, signed fills
- uniswap v2 and v3 swap math exact to the wei against quoterv2; quote path at 0.87 ms and 7.3k quotes/s at p99 10 ms on one process
- order lifecycle as an idempotent state machine with refunds, payout retries, stray-deposit sweeping, restart recovery from chain logs, and a redis writer lease with fencing tokens against double-signing
- built a typescript telegram bot (telegraf, webhook mode) for trading polymarket from chat: fok market orders, gtc limit orders, cancels, redemptions and allowance management through the polymarket clob client, with 2.5k+ users and $100k+ volume
- ran two polymarket websocket watchers with auto-reconnect and redis-backed registrations for price alerts and limit-order fills, a 12-hourly cron notifier for high-probability markets by subscribed category, and every order published to aws sqs for downstream processing
- integrated mayan and debridge so users fund from solana into polygon usdc in one flow, rendered pnl and position cards server-side with satori, shipped en/zh localisation, and deployed as a docker image to ec2 through github actions with staging and production pipelines
- built a next.js 15 farcaster mini app where users buy and sell 20 tokenized rwas (tsla, nvda, aapl, msft, xgold and others) with any token on any chain, doing $10k+ in volume
- routed every trade through bungee's cross-chain aggregator: quotes fetched on debounced input, executed as an erc20 approval plus an eip-712 signed order on the returned route, across base, polygon and gnosis
- wired farcaster's frame sdk and manifest for in-feed launch, privy with wagmi/viem for wallets, and zustand stores for token, quote and bridge state
- built a terminal coding agent in typescript on bun with an opentui interface and a hono api streaming anthropic and openai models through the ai sdk. a model is one shared catalogue entry (id, provider, pricing) that drives validation, the picker, provider resolution and billing; a new provider is one compiler-enforced switch case
- designed a split agent loop: the server owns the model, prompt, tool contracts and session transcript; the cli executes every tool call locally and posts results back, so source code never leaves the machine. plan and build modes are enforced on both sides
- added clerk oauth with pkce, session transcripts in postgres, and usage-metered billing with token usage priced into credits, ingested into polar and gated by a balance check
- fastify + typescript backend with prisma on postgresql that ranks every sanctum lst by apy and, on each sol deposit, auto-swaps into the top lst through jupiter v6
- designed mev-protected execution: the jupiter swap is decompiled, a treasury fee instruction appended, then sent as a jito bundle when the next leader is within 10 slots, tipping at the 75th-percentile landed tip across 5 block engines; otherwise falls back to a plain rpc send with a fresh blockhash
- wallet-based jwt auth with per-user authorization on all 16 endpoints, and portfolio accounting with weighted-average entry price and realized/unrealized profit in sol
simd.live — a readable index of every solana improvement document
cyfrin evm — lil projects i built while watching cyfrin's solidity course