Building real-world systems
Prathamesh Joshi
Co-founder · Principal Engineer · IoT · Distributed Systems · Cloud
I build real-world systems that run at scale, from embedded devices and edge connectivity to high-throughput backend services, cloud infrastructure, and data platforms.
About
I’m a Co-founder & Principal Engineer at Carnot Technologies (now part of Mahindra Group), where I design and build large-scale IoT and telematics platforms.
Over the last decade, I’ve worked across the stack: embedded systems, device connectivity, backend services, cloud infrastructure, and analytics. Systems I’ve architected operate at meaningful scale, supporting over 100,000 connected vehicles and processing 500M+ telemetry events per day in production.
My work is often in environments with unreliable networks and imperfect edge behavior, so I care deeply about reliability, security, and operational simplicity. I’ve led multi-cloud infrastructure across AWS, GCP, and Azure using infrastructure as code, and reduced operating costs to under $0.20 per device per month at scale.
What I do
- Build full-stack systems: device + gateway + backend + data/analytics.
- Design for scale and failure: retries, partial failures, bursty traffic, and messy telemetry.
- Operate cloud platforms: Kubernetes, IaC, reliability, security, and cost optimization.
- Deep tech: embedded systems and the hardware–software boundary.
Along the way
Much of my waking life over the last decade has revolved around Carnot. Anything I can claim to have built there has been co-created with my co-founder Pushkar and the team at Carnot. They have been equal partners in all of its achievements. Our philosophy as a compact, agile team of thinkers and doers is well captured in this post by Pushkar. A quick tour of the products we’ve built lives in this flipbook brochure.
In the early days in Carnot, when we custom-built our own hardware, I was deep in firmware and embedded systems. As the needs changed, I moved to whatever helped most: native mobile apps (Android and iOS), backend services, and running the hosted infrastructure behind it all. A lot of this happened in the pre-GPT era, which meant burnt hands, a few too many late nights, and the occasional detour into website and Unity work to put out fires (and try not to start new ones).
Before Carnot, my master’s thesis focused on metal Additive Manufacturing, done in collaboration with Sajan Kapil, and the work still excites me to this day. The work resulted in several publications and a couple of patents.
Even earlier, during my undergraduate years, I was part of IIT Bombay Racing in its formative phase. I contributed on the firmware of the first two cars we raced at Silverstone, once again alongside Pushkar. The team has since gone on to achieve remarkable success, a testament to the generations of engineers that followed.