About Me
I'm Manoj Bajaj. I trained as a mechanical engineer at IIT Delhi, but I've been writing code and building side projects since before I could spell "curriculum." The degree gave me an obsession with systems under stress — the rest I taught myself because I wanted to.
After graduating in 2017, I joined Squarepoint Capital on their execution team, where the bar was simple: every microsecond you waste is someone else's money. I spent years in proprietary trading infrastructure — shaving milliseconds off net latency, writing code that had to be both fast and correct with zero room for "it works on my machine."
From there, FalconX — where I watched a startup go from zero to one. That's where I caught the bug. Not just for building software, but for building companies.
The last three years have been startups. Founding engineer, engineering leader, sometimes both — across multiple industries, always at the earliest stages where nothing exists yet and everything matters. I've shipped products from blank repos to production, hired teams, and learned that the hardest engineering problems aren't technical — they're the ones where the system includes humans.
I'm also drawn to questions that don't have clean answers. How intelligence works. Why systems fail in the ways they do. What philosophy and astronomy have in common (hint: they both refuse to give you closure).
What I write about
- Production systems — what breaks, what survives, and the patterns in between
- AI infrastructure — the unglamorous layer between "model works" and "model works in prod"
- Building from zero — founder lessons, hiring, early-stage chaos
- Systems thinking — ideas from engineering that apply far beyond code