About

Hey, I’m Priya Pahwa 👋

DSF Director · Software Engineer · Backend & DevOps · Djangonaut Space

👩🏻‍💻 `whoami`

        
      
$ whoami
> Priya Pahwa · She/Her 
> Software Engineer | Backend · DevOps · Infra · Agentic AI
> Based in India, Asia (GMT +5:30)

I’m Priya — a software engineer navigating the intersection of code, community, and collaboration.

Community Spaces ✨

Community spaces have been foundational to my growth as an engineer and as a person. I try to give back by contributing through open-source programs, developer education, and other operational work that sustains these local and global communities in diverse and inclusive way.

Current Involvement

Board of Directors, Django Software Foundation (DSF)	Dec 2025 - Present
Member, DSF Code of Conduct Working Group	Sep 2025 - Present
Co-Chair, DSF Fundraising Working Group	Aug 2024 - Present

Past Involvement

Organizer (Session 3, 4, 5), Djangonaut Space	Aug 2024 - Dec 2025
GitHub Campus Expert, GitHub Education	Apr 2022 - Nov 2025
Organizer, GitHub Field Day India 2024	Feb 2024 - Sep 2024

Conference Talks

Django Day India 2025	Organizing Djangonaut Space: A Toolkit for Inclusive Events
UIET Software Freedom Day 2025	The Open Source Community Invites YOU To Dare Greatly
PyCon Greece 2025	Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast: Why Psychological Safety Matters in Open Source
DjangoCongress Japan 2025	Culture Eats Strategy for Breakfast: Why Psychological Safety Matters in Open Source

You can find more details about my community work and experience at Volunteering and Talks and Media.

Work Experience 💼

I am a Software Engineer focused on Backend Engineering and DevOps. My work spans from architecting Django-based applications to automating CI/CD pipelines while ensuring system reliability throughout the development and deployment process.

Software Engineer (Backend and DevOps)

BeyondIRR (FinTech Startup)

Dec 2023 - Present

Expand to know responsibilities involved in this role

Built and maintained backend APIs, systems, and microservices using Python, Django, Django REST Framework, PostgreSQL, Flask, and SQLAlchemy.
Designed, developed, and deployed multi-agent AI orchestration using PydanticAI and FastAPI to support large-scale financial data analysis.
Implemented retrieval-based pipelines (RAG) using Django REST, LangChain, and PGVector, including PostgreSQL search optimizations with Trigram indexes.
Led the DevOps vertical by setting up and maintaining AWS infrastructure for production workloads, including EC2-based services and ECS-managed containers.
Built and maintained CI/CD pipelines using CircleCI, managing container builds in ECR/ACR and deployments via AWS SSM and Kubernetes using Helm charts for a multi-tenant system.
Improved system reliability through automated testing (Pytest), security fixes from VAPT reviews, and observability using ClickHouse, Vector, Metabase, k6, and Grafana.

Software Engineer Intern

GitHub Octernships (In Partnership with Dive)

Aug 2023 - Oct 2023

Expand to know responsibilities involved in this role

Designed Django REST APIs with structured Pytest coverage for an AI meeting assistant using Sentry and Datadog as observatory tools.
Implemented real-time document collaboration features including a Slate.js–compatible transformer and action-items automation integrations with Google Meet and Zoom video calls.
Enhanced search functionality with Algolia to index templates and support agenda creation.

Read about my Devlogue (Developer/Ops Logs) at Software Development.

I occasionally write about random thoughts and tech meeting facilitations at Engineering Management.