Viraj Sabhaya

Software Engineer | Backend & Infrastructure

I build backend services and the tools to deploy, troubleshoot, and maintain them. Healthcare systems at Altera Digital Health. Open-source work in reliability and software dependency analysis.

Dallas-Fort Worth, Texas

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About

Backend systems. Practical delivery.

At Altera Digital Health, I work on terminology services used by EHR applications. That includes modernizing interfaces, troubleshooting SQL Server, automating releases, and working with QA and domain specialists to preserve existing behavior while improving the system.

My open-source work explores crash recovery, retry safety, and software dependency evidence. I value clear operating constraints, reproducible tests, and human oversight when AI tools interact with enterprise systems. My research background adds experience with graph analysis and making complex data easier to inspect.

In practice

Delivery and reliability.

50%

Reduced QA server count from 14 to 7 through consolidation, reducing the number of environments to maintain.

CI/CD

Automated Web API builds and on-premises IIS delivery, including tests, versioned artifacts, SQL updates, and health checks.

30 cases

Deterministic crash/retry scenarios in EffectFence's model-based benchmark, covering unsafe schedules and safe controls.

Experience

Where I've worked.

05/2024 - Current Remote

Software Engineer at Altera Digital Health

Healthcare terminology engineering with C#/.NET, SQL Server, Python, TypeScript, PowerShell, and Azure DevOps.

  • Modernized a legacy SOAP-based terminology platform by developing REST APIs and a backward-compatible integration NuGet package, enabling existing EHR applications to migrate without client-side code changes.
  • Cut search response times to 1-3 seconds across 5M+ unique relational records by optimizing SQL Server queries with phonetic search, after tracing slowdowns to stale statistics via execution plans.
  • Built and ran an automated test tool (PowerShell, T-SQL) to check that no data or API behavior was lost in the move to the new service, covering 70M+ records and 28.9K API test cases. It found 45 confirmed issues (1 Critical, 21 High) and led to 13 fix PRs, including a fix for about 9.2M broken code mappings.
  • Built an internal LLM-orchestrated triage tool that automates root-cause investigation for clinical-terminology data-quality tickets, coordinating a tool-calling agent (TypeScript, Python) over read-only, guard-railed SQL Server, ServiceNow, and Azure DevOps DA backlog APIs, giving the data-quality team self-serve investigation with zero unreviewed writes.
  • Engineered end-to-end CI/CD pipelines using Azure DevOps for .NET Web APIs, automating versioned builds, unit testing, artifact packaging, environment-specific IIS deployments, SQL stored procedure updates, application backups, and post-deployment health checks to improve release reliability and reduce manual deployment effort.
  • Collaborated with Support and PM to turn client deployment requirements into features, then built single-file installers (IIS API/SOAP, database, windows services) for the terminology platform, refining them through dry-run test deployments on a server farm.
09/2022 - 05/2024 UT Arlington

Software Developer at IT Lab

  • Co-authored IEEE BigDataService 2023 and VLDB 2025 papers by co-building a live graph-analytics dashboard (Python).
  • Built analysis and visualization modules (Pandas, NetworkX, Matplotlib) for large graph networks like airline routes, LinkedIn, and IMDb, using Louvain/Infomap community detection, and added visuals that make big graph data easy to understand.
06/2022 - 08/2022 Addison, TX

Software Engineer Intern at Securonix

  • Automated Cypress end-to-end test suites for the SNYPR SIEM platform, by replacing manual regression scripts with reusable automated flows, which resulted in reduced manual QA workload.
  • Built Kafka and Spark data-pipeline automation tooling, by replacing manual ETL steps with scripted jobs.

Applied AI

What I know about AI systems.

Context engineering
What goes into the model's context window: system prompts, repository instructions, documents, and tool results, kept small and relevant.
Tool calling and agent loops
The model asks for a structured tool call, the app runs it, and the result goes back into context until the task is done.
Model Context Protocol (MCP)
A standard way to expose tools and data to models, including what happens when a tool call is retried or fails.
Retrieval-augmented generation (RAG)
Chunking, embeddings, and vector search (FAISS) or full-text search (SQLite FTS5) to ground answers in source material.
Guardrails and human review
Read-only tools, limited data access, and approval before any write; model output is a draft until checked.

Recommendations

From the people I work with.

View on LinkedIn

Education

A foundation in computer science.

Degree

University of Texas at Arlington

Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, May 2024.

Algorithms, operating systems, databases, software testing, AI, machine learning, and networks.

Campus work

From lab support to development

Progressed from Student Lab Assistant to Research Assistant and IT Lab Developer, supporting users before contributing to research and software delivery.

Community

Mobi and ACM at UTA

Contributed as a junior developer with Mobi's software development club and participated in the campus CS community through ACM.

Engineering stack

Tools behind the work.

Used across my professional work and open-source projects.

Build

Languages

C# Python PowerShell SQL TypeScript JavaScript Bash

Ship

Services and data

ASP.NET Core REST APIs SOAP SQL Server PostgreSQL Kafka

Operate

Delivery and reliability

Azure DevOps CI/CD IIS GitHub Actions Docker Fault injection

Augment

Applied AI

GitHub Copilot LLM tool calling RAG LangChain FAISS SQLite FTS5

Recognition

Research and recognition.

Altera Digital Health

Employee Recognition

Recognized for technical ownership, problem-solving, collaboration, and delivery of critical clinical terminology content releases.

VLDB 2025 | Demo paper

MLN-geeWhiz

Co-authored "MLN-geeWhiz: A Dashboard for Supporting Complete Life-Cycle of Complex Data Analysis using Multilayer Networks," presented at VLDB 2025.

Read VLDB demo paper

Academic excellence

Nokia Outstanding Professional CS Student

Received the academic excellence award from the University of Texas at Arlington Computer Science department in both 2023 and 2024.

Times Square, NYC

LinkLeap: URL Shortener

Won 1st prize for the development of LinkLeap, a URL shortener, among more than 300 participants. The project was featured in Times Square in New York City.

HackUTA 2023

Best Use of Streamlit

Won the Streamlit category with the Load-N-Ask team for a document question-answering application.

View award and team

IEEE BigDataService

MLN-Visualizer

Co-authored “MLN-Visualizer: Interactive Visualization of Graphs and Multilayer Network Analysis Results,” presented through IEEE BigDataService.

View IEEE publication

Contact

Let's talk.

I'm interested in backend infrastructure, platform engineering, and developer productivity roles. Let's talk about what your team is building.