Nivaan Goyal — engineer, entrepreneur, writer. London.

The short version

I'm Nivaan Goyal. I grew up in Delhi, moved to the UK to read Computer Science at the University of Cambridge, and never quite left. I live in Islington now with my wife, an inherited filter coffee maker, and a small, judgemental cat called Pixel.

I spent the last twelve years writing code for large companies you've heard of: four years at Google (on Search infrastructure and later Cloud Spanner), three years at Meta (on the ads delivery platform in the London office), and five years at Amazon (on AWS Lambda and latterly as a Principal Engineer on an internal platform I'm not allowed to name). I briefly did six months at Stripe in Dublin because a friend asked nicely.

I stepped away from full-time employment in early 2025 to write more, advise founders, and think about what the next decade of software engineering actually looks like. I don't call myself a "creator". I write because I read a lot and eventually I have to say something back.

The longer version

The honest story is less linear. I wanted to be a theoretical physicist until I took one compilers module and realised software was the only field where you could build something interesting and also get paid. I joined Google London straight from Cambridge in 2013, spent four years there learning what "production" actually means, and then left for Meta because I wanted to work on something closer to the user than protocol buffers.

The middle of my career — 2017 to 2023 — was the part I write about the most. It was the hard bit. I was promoted twice, passed over for promotion once, burnt out visibly enough that my manager took me to a coffee shop on Commercial Street and told me I looked dreadful, ran two teams I wasn't ready to run, and eventually figured out how to be useful without being on fire. Most of what I publish is aimed at the engineer who is three years into that middle bit and wondering why it's so much harder than the job descriptions suggest.

The technology expertise is real but I try not to make it the whole personality. I've built consensus protocols, debugged kernel panics on production shards at four in the morning, given more system design interviews than I care to count, and watched at least three large companies from the inside make the same expensive mistakes in sequence. When I write about these things I try to tell you the version that's true after the retrospective, not the version that fits a conference slide.

Entrepreneurship

I've been around enough start-ups now to have opinions. I currently advise six early-stage companies across the UK and EU, mostly seed to Series B, most of them UK-based. The work sits somewhere between a technical co-founder and a sounding board: I read the architecture, sit in on the hard hiring rounds, and sometimes write the document nobody on the team has the time to write.

I'm not currently running a start-up of my own, and I'm honest about why: I know myself well enough to know that I don't have the appetite for it at this particular moment. What I've learned from the founders I work with — about pacing, conviction, when to hire, when to not — ends up in the blog whenever it's portable.

Meditation and spirituality

I started sitting daily in the summer of 2016, initially as a reluctant attempt to fix a sleep problem, and kept going long after the sleep problem fixed itself. I did my first ten-day silent Vipassana retreat at Dhamma Dipa in Herefordshire in 2018 and have done one a year since, pandemic permitting. A decent chunk of what I think I know about engineering leadership actually comes from what that discipline taught me about paying attention.

On the spirituality side I'm agnostic, allergic to gurus, and more interested in practice than in belief. I read the Bhagavad Gita most mornings, with tea; I find Ram Dass, the Stoics and Sadhguru variously useful and variously irritating. If you're looking for certainty you'll be disappointed. If you're looking for an engineer who has found the quiet version of this stuff useful, you and I might get on.

Career timeline

• Independent Writer, Advisor & Entrepreneur 2025 – present
  Self-employed · London
  Writing this site. Advising six early-stage companies across the UK and EU, mostly on infrastructure and technical hiring. Occasional paid engagements; no VC fund.
• Principal Software Engineer 2020 – 2025
  Amazon Web Services · London
  Led the platform team behind an internal service layer used across AWS. Promoted to Principal in 2022. Spent a lot of time on serverless cold-start latency and the politics of deprecation.
• Software Engineer → Senior SWE 2017 – 2020
  Meta · London
  Ads delivery infrastructure. Helped rewrite the real-time bidding pipeline that still powers Instagram story ads in the UK and EU.
• Software Engineer 2013 – 2017
  Google · London / Zurich
  Two years on Search indexing, then two years on Cloud Spanner. Moved to Zurich for twelve months. Came back because London is better.
• BA/MEng Computer Science 2010 – 2013
  University of Cambridge
  Trinity College. Dissertation on lock-free data structures. Still can't explain linearisability to my in-laws.

Speaking & writing

I've given talks at QCon London, InfoQ, SREcon EMEA and a handful of smaller meet-ups around London, Manchester and Edinburgh. I write a weekly essay, The Tuesday Memo, and an occasional long-form post here on the blog.

Working together

I take on a small number of advisory engagements per year with early-stage companies, typically seed to Series B, usually UK- or Europe-based. I also occasionally do deep technical reviews for investors. If you think we should talk, the contact page is the right place to start.