# Mishuk Adhikari

**Lead Software Engineer |  9+ yrs in software |  Agentic AI: agents in production**  
[mishuk.ad.bd@gmail.com](mailto:mishuk.ad.bd@gmail.com) |  Dhaka, Bangladesh  [linkedin.com/in/mishuk-adhikari](https://linkedin.com/in/mishuk-adhikari) |  [github.com/MishukAdhikari](https://github.com/MishukAdhikari) |  [mishuk.me](https://mishuk.me)

## Professional Summary

Lead Engineer with **9+ years in software**, now building **agentic AI in production**: agents that diagnose, fix and ship to staging, and the internal tooling they run on (MCP servers, scoped access, audit logs). I lead a team of **8+** at xCloud, a multi-cloud hosting platform running **100,000+ apps on 10,000+ servers**, where I own the subscription and billing systems, the white-label and enterprise products and the enterprise API, and ship into provisioning across seven clouds. Debug across the whole stack, from nginx and PHP-FPM to payment state. Open to remote and international work.

## Technical Skills

- **Agentic AI:** agent design, tool calling, orchestration, production LLM integration, MCP servers (built Agent Modem), context retrieval, verification gates, scoped access, audit logging, observability and guardrails; Claude Code, Codex, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent
- **Languages:** Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, PHP, SQL, Bash, Kotlin
- **Backend and architecture:** Laravel (queues, Horizon, policies, Nova, Vapor), REST and enterprise API design, OpenAPI, system design, multi-tenant SaaS, queue and worker fleets, Pest, PHPUnit, TDD
- **Billing and payments:** Stripe (Elements, SetupIntent, 3D Secure, webhooks), PayPal, PayKickStart, subscription and recurring billing, proration, invoicing, licensing
- **Infrastructure:** Linux, Nginx, OpenLiteSpeed, PHP-FPM, MySQL, Redis, Memcached, systemd, Docker, CI/CD (GitHub Actions), Cloudflare; DigitalOcean, Vultr, Hetzner, Hostinger, AWS, GCP, Linode
- **Frontend and mobile:** Vue.js 2 and 3, Inertia.js, Alpine.js, Tailwind CSS, service workers and PWA, WebAuthn and passkeys; Android with Kotlin and Jetpack Compose
- **WordPress:** plugin development, WP-CLI, WooCommerce, cache-plugin integrations, PHP-FPM and cache tuning, site-fleet automation, live site migration

## Agentic AI Engineering

At xCloud, 2026. Agent design, tool calling and orchestration, built on one rule: the interesting problem with AI in engineering is not the model, it is bounded, auditable access, so AI sits on top of the permission system and never around it. The agents chain, so that **Pro Engineer diagnoses, Hotfix Express Bro implements, and a human merges**.

- **Pro Engineer**, diagnosis: retrieves the relevant Laravel models and curated domain context, reads sanitized database views, production errors and logs, and hands engineers a diagnosis with a likely fix path; opens pull requests with reviewers and QA assigned, **never merges**. Assisted **hundreds of support investigations** in its first month, about **87%** with a clear first-pass routing signal.
- **Hotfix Express Bro**, implementation: reproduces the failure before writing code, ships the smallest complete fix through **seven verification gates**, and opens one traceable pull request per assignment. A human's QA sign-off outranks anything the bot asserts, and merge authority is enforced by a GitHub App ruleset rather than by convention. QA redeploys on its staging fleet went from **over 4 minutes to 7 seconds**.
- **Craft Mishuk**, billing: reconciles invoices against processor state, computes proration and refunds deterministically in scripts, sum-checks its own first answer, and saves every customer reply as a **draft for a human**.
- **The access and control layer**: Agent Bridge and Agent Modem expose token-scoped, **read-only** endpoints for logs, service state and config validation, with per-site customer opt-out and a full audit log; production data is read through a select-only role over sanitized views. The approve, merge and stop controls run as a Slack surface with its own service and sign-in gate.
- **In-product AI assistant**: closed its **multi-tenant authorization holes**, audited the tool catalogue and fixed the definitions that broke at runtime, and shipped Claude Skills with the Enterprise release.

## Professional Experience

### Lead Engineer
**xCloud (Startise)** | Dhaka, Bangladesh (hybrid) | **Oct 2021 -- Present**

Multi-cloud managed hosting platform running **100,000+ apps** on **10,000+ servers** across **30+ data centres**. Led YIVE Sites (Oct 2021 to 2022), then xCloud (Sep 2022 to present).

- **Own the billing and subscription systems** behind the platform's revenue (recurring billing, provider billing, Stripe and PayPal, 3D Secure, lifetime-deal conversions, invoice consolidation) and the revenue-integrity tooling that finds and repairs missing, mis-dated and orphaned bills from a dry-run preview, so billing errors stopped being something a customer reports.
- **Cut the revenue-integrity report's database load by about 94%** per page, locked in by a query budget in the test suite; retired a legacy payment path that could resolve any submitted card, leaving one guarded path with tests that fail if it returns.
- **Own the white-label reseller product and xCloud Enterprise**: tenant-scoped accounts, payment-gated provisioning, a separate enterprise API with policy-based access, plan-gated feature locks, idempotent checkout and [public reference documentation](https://app.xcloud.host/api/enterprise/v1.0/docs); closed an account-enumeration exposure by moving external identifiers to UUIDs platform-wide.
- **Escalation point for production incidents**: traced a cross-tenant redirect to an nginx variable bug rather than the customer's cache plugin, and a dark server to an out-of-memory killer taking out sshd; wrote both up and removed the failure modes.
- **Own a large share of the provider integrations** (Hetzner, Hostinger, Vultr dedicated plans, region-aware availability) across seven cloud providers, and ship tested changes into the provisioning templates: outage-safe PHP-FPM auto-tuning, HTTP/3 gating, nginx custom blocks, MySQL auto-heal gating.
- **Led the upgrade to Laravel 12 and PHP 8.4** (Nova 5, Inertia 2) with the full regression suite green at release, then the platform-wide UI release and its design-system migration; introduced architecture decision records as the team's decision log and wrote most of them.
- **Lead a team of 8+ engineers**, a few of them remote: review a large share of the team's changes before release, assign subsystem ownership, designed and run the hiring panel, coordinate the weekly release and write the decisions down.

### Software Engineer
**WPDeveloper** | Dhaka, Bangladesh | **Sep 2019 -- Sep 2021**

- **Led the YIVE Sites codebase from 2020** as its top contributor and the reviewer who merged most of the team's work; built automated WordPress blog networks across server fleets, with DNS, SSL, custom domains and TTL caching, and designed the per-server queue and Horizon worker system that distributed building, crawling and publishing across **100+ hosting servers serving 200,000+ users**.
- Built the **video builder in Vue.js** for YIVE's content product, plus scraping and content-generation pipelines; hardened the hosting fleet by hand (SSH lockdown, firewall rules, automated security updates).

### Back End Developer (remote, part-time)
**SearchworxX** | Allentown, PA, USA | **Mar 2018 -- Aug 2019**

- Built **REST and SOAP APIs** and PHP web scrapers and consolidated several services into one application, **fully remote** for a US employer about 11 time zones away; built the early YIVE products, including an SEO rank-tracking SaaS with subscription and credit billing.

### Software Engineer
**REPTO Education Center** | Dhaka, Bangladesh | **Nov 2017 -- Feb 2018**

- Built and maintained **WordPress plugins**; built frontend apps with Vue 2 and jQuery.

## Open Source and Community

- **Laravel Telescope** ([GitHub](https://github.com/laravel/telescope/pull/1146)): contributed the slow-query filter and documented it in the Laravel docs, 2021.
- **WordPress.org** ([profile](https://profiles.wordpress.org/mishuk24/)): two plugins in the directory. **WordCamp** Asia 2023 (Bangkok) and 2025 (Manila), Dhaka, Rajshahi.

## Education and Training

**National University (New Model Degree College), Dhaka**  |  **2017 - 2022**

Bachelor of Business Administration (BBA)

**Training**: Lead Like an Agilist: Time, Teams and Transformation (Startise, 2025); Achieving Excellence with Emotional Intelligence (BITM with WPDeveloper, 2022)

---

## How the agents are bounded

Three agents chain: one diagnoses, one implements and deploys to staging, one works the
billing surface. None of them can merge code or send a customer message without a human.
Merge authority is enforced by a GitHub App ruleset rather than by convention, and every
customer reply the billing agent writes is saved as a draft.

They read production through a layer built for the purpose: token-scoped, read-only
endpoints for log listing and reads, service state, journal reads and configuration
validation, each behind its own token ability, with a per-site customer opt-out and an audit
log entry for every call. Production data is read through a select-only database role over
sanitized views that mask customer email and team names and strip secrets. No generic file
reads outside the log roots, no arbitrary queries, no credential decryption: a stored
credential is checked by calling the provider's own read-only verify endpoint, so the agent
learns whether it works without ever seeing it.

## One diagnosis, in full

A customer site was returning a Cloudflare 526, and the deployment task that should have
built it was marked finished. The agent read the task output instead of trusting its status.
`npm ci` had aborted with `EUSAGE` because the repository had no lockfile; because it never
completed, `npm run build` never ran; because the build never ran, the output directory was
never created; because there was nothing in it, the origin had nothing to serve, and the edge
reported a handshake failure four layers above the actual cause.

The heuristic that found it is the one written into the agent: never trust `exit_code = 0`.
A task status is a claim about a task. The output is evidence about the work. Where the two
disagree, the output wins. Three of the four layers between the symptom and the cause were
reporting success.

---

*The CV of Mishuk Adhikari as plain markdown, generated from the same source as the PDF at
https://mishuk.me/Mishuk-Adhikari-CV.pdf. A summary of the site for machine readers is at
https://mishuk.me/llms.txt. Last updated 14 September 2026. Customer, ticket and server
identifiers are stripped from every case described here.*