Nodes

whoami

I’m Loy Rao. I take complex, real-world problems, find the right abstraction, and turn them into systems that teams can build on.

Staff Engineer at Rokt. Over 8+ years, the domain has changed: event streaming platforms, real-time financial settlement, identity resolution, edge networking, data residency, NoSQL platform, fraud detection. The approach hasn’t. Go where the hardest problem is, understand it deeply, design something that works at scale, and make sure it outlasts you.

The Vector Vombat persona is a nod to two things:

1. Vector — the fundamental unit of direction and magnitude in systems thinking. Data pipelines, event streams, and distributed consensus all reduce to vectors of state change propagating through a system.

2. Vombat — the wombat (Vombatus ursinus), native to Australia. An animal that builds complex, resilient burrow systems, engineers cubic fecal markers for territory mapping (a genuine unsolved geometry problem), and survives environmental extremes through metabolic efficiency. Systemic durability in its purest biological form.

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distributed-datastores/
├── cassandra/          # Multi-region production operations, operator
│                       # internals, capacity planning, k8ssandra
├── storage-engines/    # LSM trees, compaction strategies, write-ahead logs
└── consistency/        # Tunable consistency, anti-entropy repair,
                        # the CAP/PACELC trade-offs that shape every decision

streaming-and-data/
├── kafka/              # Cluster operations, cross-region replication,
│                       # schema evolution, exactly-once semantics
├── spark-flink/        # Stateful stream processing, checkpointing,
│                       # backpressure management
└── event-architecture/ # Event sourcing, CQRS, medallion patterns,
                        # declarative topology DSLs

platform-engineering/
├── kubernetes/         # Operators for stateful workloads, StatefulSets
├── edge/               # Global API routing, rate limiting, data residency
├── iac/                # Pulumi, Terraform, GitOps-driven infrastructure
└── observability/      # Prometheus, Grafana, OpenTelemetry

uptime

• Event Streaming and Data Infrastructure — Migrated Rokt’s entire event bus from SQS to Apache Kafka. Designed a declarative DSL that abstracts event topology, adopted Avro and Schema Registry for cross-platform schema evolution, and stood up the full ecosystem: cross-region replication, CDC pipelines, access control, consumer patterns. More recently, Spark/Flink for stateful stream processing.

• Distributed Datastores — Built a globally available, multi-region NoSQL platform on Apache Cassandra handling petabytes of data at scale. Led the migration from a proprietary database, evaluated K8s operators, and designed the platform layer that exposes distributed storage as a self-service capability for product teams.

• Edge and Networking — Architected Rokt’s edge platform governing all public-facing API traffic across global regions. Built a cloud-agnostic variant that outperformed a major CDN provider by ~87% on average latency. Designed the foundational routing layer for data residency compliance at P99 < 15ms.

• Identity Resolution — Part of a team born from a hackathon that recognised identity resolution needed decoupling from conversion attribution. Evaluated graph databases and helped build a Spark-based identity resolution algorithm, framing the problem as a graph with edges defining relationships between device and user identifiers.

dig vectorvombat.dev

This site is built with the same principles I apply to production systems:

nslookup vectorvombat.*