About

I'm Nirmal, Amplitude's first engineer. I joined the founders before there was any real revenue and helped grow it into a public company doing $374M ARR.

I built a lot of the core product. There's Nova, our in-house column store and query engine for behavioral analytics, which I co-architected with co-founder Jeffrey Wang and later led the rewrite of. Kronos, a storage system that cut per-user timeline costs by 10x using S3 partial reads. And Amplitude Experiment, our experimentation and feature-flagging product, which I started from scratch. Its cohort targeting and identity resolution is patented.

Along the way I did whatever was needed: sales, support, marketing, ops, frontend, backend, platform, and devops. I led orgs of 60-plus people. What never changed was listening to customers and shipping fast.

Outside of Amplitude, I write about computing and AI, including a series on the Turing Award winners and the history of the field. I'm also active in angel investing and the Bay Area tech scene.