Off the clock · Pune · October 2026

Syed Faiz Imam, after hoursOff‑call

I'm Faiz Imam, a backend engineer. Here's an evening of everything else, from sunset cricket to 2am: books, records, guitar, PS5 and the map of where I've been.

The longer story

About Faiz Imam

I'm Syed Faiz Imam; most people call me Faiz. I'm a Senior Software Developer at Bajaj Finserv Health, part of Bajaj Finserv, in Pune. I joined in January 2023 as an intern and have been building the systems on the other side of this site ever since: the voicebot platform behind 50M+ calls, the move to Kafka, a fine-tuned model that cut our LLM bill by 74%, and the React Native clinic app.

Before that came a B.Tech in Computer Science at SRM Institute of Science and Technology (2019 to 2023), a research internship at NITI Aayog, and a web development internship at The Sparks Foundation. In 2025 I went back to SRM as an interviewer and mentor for Ideathon 5.0.

Off the clock it's cricket whenever there's a ground and enough people, 50 books on the shelf, coding lofi on repeat, a guitar on the balcony, and a map I'm slowly filling in: 19 of 28 states, plus Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. The Northeast and Kerala are next.

RésuméLinkedIn ↗GitHub ↗Medium ↗

Based in
Pune, India
Work
Senior Software Developer, Bajaj Finserv Health
Since
2023
Studied
B.Tech CSE, SRM
Books
50 and counting
Next trip
The Northeast
6:40 pm

Cricket before dark

I play cricket whenever there's a ground and enough people. Take guard and face a ball. last over before the light goes

Scoreboard
0/0 0.0 ov
This over

Take guard. The bowler is at the top of his mark.

7:30 pm

The study

50 books from Syed Faiz Imam's shelves, bound in leather and gold. It's getting dark in here. fifty and counting

Novels
Classics and other worlds
Mind and meaning
History, science and money
50 volumes · Ex libris Syed Faiz Imam
All 50 books as a list
  • The Kite Runner · Khaled Hosseini
  • A Thousand Splendid Suns · Khaled Hosseini
  • A Man Called Ove · Fredrik Backman
  • The Book Thief · Markus Zusak
  • Flowers for Algernon · Daniel Keyes
  • The God of Small Things · Arundhati Roy
  • East of Eden · John Steinbeck
  • To Kill a Mockingbird · Harper Lee
  • The Secret History · Donna Tartt
  • Gone Girl · Gillian Flynn
  • Shutter Island · Dennis Lehane
  • And Then There Were None · Agatha Christie
  • The Silent Patient · Alex Michaelides
  • The Shining · Stephen King
  • Crime and Punishment · Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • The Brothers Karamazov · Fyodor Dostoevsky
  • The Count of Monte Cristo · Alexandre Dumas
  • The Stranger · Albert Camus
  • The Trial · Franz Kafka
  • 1984 · George Orwell
  • Brave New World · Aldous Huxley
  • Siddhartha · Hermann Hesse
  • Dune · Frank Herbert
  • The Three-Body Problem · Liu Cixin
  • Project Hail Mary · Andy Weir
  • Red Rising · Pierce Brown
  • Man's Search for Meaning · Viktor E. Frankl
  • Meditations · Marcus Aurelius
  • The Myth of Sisyphus · Albert Camus
  • Tao Te Ching · Lao Tzu
  • The Art of Loving · Erich Fromm
  • Thinking, Fast and Slow · Daniel Kahneman
  • The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat · Oliver Sacks
  • Psycho-Cybernetics · Maxwell Maltz
  • The Mountain Is You · Brianna Wiest
  • Deep Work · Cal Newport
  • Four Thousand Weeks · Oliver Burkeman
  • When Breath Becomes Air · Paul Kalanithi
  • Sapiens · Yuval Noah Harari
  • Guns, Germs, and Steel · Jared Diamond
  • The Argumentative Indian · Amartya Sen
  • The Diary of a Young Girl · Anne Frank
  • The Gulag Archipelago · Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn
  • The Emperor of All Maladies · Siddhartha Mukherjee
  • A Brief History of Time · Stephen Hawking
  • The Selfish Gene · Richard Dawkins
  • The Psychology of Money · Morgan Housel
  • Poor Charlie's Almanack · Charlie Munger
  • The Intelligent Investor · Benjamin Graham
  • The 48 Laws of Power · Robert Greene
8:30 pm

Coding lofi

What plays while I build: seven original lofi beats, made live in your browser. Drop one on the platter. headphones on

Nothing spinning yet.

9:15 pm

/now

The corkboard by the desk: what Syed Faiz Imam is focused on this month, and what he's learning.

this month

Owning the vehicle damage-detection module for Vidal International.
Keeping the voicebot steady past 500,000 calls a month.
Reading history and fiction after work.
Planning the next trip: the Northeast is next on the map.

updated October 2026

currently learning

Computer vision for vehicle damage detectionbuilding it at workdeep in it
Evaluating fine-tuned vision-language modelsafter the Qwen2.5-VL migrationin progress
Distributed systems, from the original papersKafka, Raft, Dynamoup next
10:10 pm

Guitar on the balcony

I play guitar. Run a finger across the strings, or pick a chord. sound on

pick a chord, then strum

or play something from the songbook

1:30 am

Tabs and drafts

Laptop open, lights off: the tech and history blogs Faiz Imam keeps coming back to, and the posts he wants to write next.

reading · 7 tabs open
techThe Pragmatic EngineerGergely Orosz

How big tech teams actually build, ship and run software.

techByteByteGoAlex Xu

System design explained with clear diagrams.

techNetflix TechBlogNetflix

Streaming, data and reliability at enormous scale.

techThe Cloudflare BlogCloudflare

Networking and incident write-ups with real depth.

historyA Collection of Unmitigated PedantryBret Devereaux

Military and economic history, taken seriously and told well.

historyJSTOR Daily: HistoryJSTOR

Short history pieces backed by scholarship.

historySmithsonian: HistorySmithsonian Magazine

Stories from the past, from archaeology to the modern era.

drafts
  • From a database queue to Kafka: how a voicebot survived 2× traffictechidea
  • Replacing GPT-4o with a fine-tuned Qwen2.5-VL, and the 74% cost cuttechidea
  • What 50 million phone calls taught me about retriestechidea
  • Dak chowki: the Mughal relay post that worked like a message queuehistoryidea
  • The Silk Road as the first distributed systemhistoryidea
  • Atomic Habits for engineers: systems over goals, in codebooksidea
  • Sapiens and the shared stories software runs onbooksidea
2:04 am

The window

Can't sleep, so: India at night, lit up where Syed Faiz Imam has travelled. Hover or tap a state. the northeast is next

Pune
22places visited

19 of 28 states, plus Delhi, Jammu and Kashmir, and Ladakh. The Northeast and Kerala are next.

visitednot yethome, Pune

Visited: Jammu and Kashmir, Ladakh, Delhi, Rajasthan, Gujarat, Maharashtra, Goa, Karnataka, Tamil Nadu, Andhra Pradesh, Telangana, Madhya Pradesh, Chhattisgarh, Odisha, Jharkhand, Bihar, West Bengal, Uttar Pradesh, Uttarakhand, Himachal Pradesh, Punjab, Haryana.

State boundaries: DataMeet (MIT licence).