---
title: "About · Ashwin Gopalsamy"
description: "Biographical background, technical focus, and professional history of Ashwin Gopalsamy."
---
# about

Software engineer focused on sub-second payment authorization and distributed systems.

## Engineering and Infrastructure

I am a Staff Software Engineer at Pismo, a Visa company, working on distributed payment authorization systems. My work focuses on the ingress layer that parses, validates, and routes ISO 8583 messages from global card networks under strict PCI-DSS constraints and sub-second latency budgets.

My primary language is Go. Before Pismo, I spent three years at Solaris SE in Berlin building core-banking microservices, interest-bearing financial products, transaction processing engines, and card network integrations. Earlier in my career, I spent time at Hexaware Technologies and Microsoft.

## Education and Research

Starting this fall, I am pursuing a Master of Science in Artificial Intelligence at UT Austin, studying machine learning foundations alongside my engineering work. My research interests center on agent architectures, structured representation fidelity, and verifiable protocol systems.

## Location and Craft

I work remotely from Pollachi, Tamil Nadu, India, surrounded by coconut groves near the foothills of the Western Ghats.

Outside software engineering, I spend time exploring automotive machinery, anthropology, regional history, photography, and reading. You can explore my technical writings in the[Library](/library/), inspect software projects in [Work](/work/), or read my machine-readable interfaces at [/ai](/ai/) and [/developers](/developers/).