Infrastructure Engineer
Four projects built and run in real environments — one actively used in a fraud investigation, one monitoring live financial activity in real time, one running live blockchain infrastructure, and one that automated the tools that started it all.
Apu Saha
Self-taught infrastructure engineer building node infrastructure, observability pipelines, and forensic analysis tools.
I came from restaurant kitchens. Ten years of nights, weekends, and double shifts — the kind of work where you learn endurance before you learn anything else. When COVID hit, I lost my job overnight.
I took whatever work I could find. I moved into food manufacturing — production lines, heat, heavy lifting, long shifts managing teams. Over time my back, knees, and wrists started breaking down. I was spending money I didn't have on physio just to stay functional enough to show up the next day. I had a daughter to raise. No safety net. No fallback.
I drove Uber on weekends until a dangerous incident forced me to stop. I spent two years studying Forex — building scripts, backtesting strategies, learning risk management. The markets taught me pattern recognition and discipline. The losses taught me something more valuable: humility, and the real cost of shortcuts.
Then I invested in a blockchain project that turned out to be a scam. It hurt financially. But it introduced me to something that changed everything — infrastructure.
A community member helped me run my first Linux node. I had never touched Linux before. I didn't know Docker, networking, automation, or system administration. But something clicked.
I rebuilt nodes from scratch. I debugged failures at midnight after factory shifts. I learned Docker, container isolation, monitoring pipelines, backup strategies, and recovery workflows. I went from asking questions to answering them. Within the community I became the person people came to when their nodes broke. Even after the project collapsed and the scam was exposed — I didn't stop.
Working in kitchens taught me to perform under pressure without losing precision. Factory floors taught me resilience and consistency. Forex taught me to read patterns and manage risk. Fatherhood taught me to think in decades, not weeks. Loss taught me to question every assumption. Those lessons show up in every system I build.
My path wasn't linear. It wasn't clean. There were years where survival took priority over ambition. But every setback sharpened something. Every late night debugging alone built something that a classroom never could. Every system I had to fix under pressure — with no mentor, no team, no safety net — that's the engineer I became.
My engineering mindset was shaped by kitchens, factory floors, financial loss, and rebuilding myself through infrastructure.
Everything I build now comes from the same place: resilience, clarity, and real-world pressure.
Projects
Pre-Forge Operator Toolkit
A collection of 23 tools built while running real blockchain node infrastructure for a community of operators who had never touched Linux before. No textbook. No course. Just real problems showing up — broken nodes, corrupted data, failed syncs, permission errors — and tools written to fix them.
Every tool here was deployed back to real community members. Some were rewritten multiple times when they failed in the field. Some were deleted entirely when they weren't good enough. What's here is what actually worked.
When the project turned out to be a scam, the work remained — and so did every lesson that shaped the projects that followed.
- Six node installers — from a simple single-file setup to a self-healing installer that detects when a download link breaks, asks for a new one, and rewrites itself automatically
- A Linux performance tuner with full undo capability — every setting it changes is backed up first so it can be reversed completely
- A sync progress calculator, a connection quality checker, and a port checker — all built to diagnose live node problems fast
- A database corruption scanner that finds damaged files after a hard crash, removes them from the node, and keeps them isolated so they can't cause further damage
- Backup, restore, and a shared sync tool so operators who fell behind could skip days of waiting and jump straight to the current state
- A browser-based fraud tracker that follows money across 15 different networks — became the starting point for Neural Trace
MultiSig Treasury Wallet
A shared wallet where no single person can move money alone. Two out of three owners must agree before any transaction goes through. Built from scratch — not using an existing tool — to understand exactly what this type of security is doing at the rules level. Deployed live and publicly verifiable.
- Two out of three owners must approve any payment — one compromised account can never move money alone
- Three steps to complete a payment: propose it, approve it, send it. Once sent it cannot be repeated by accident
- Owners can be added or removed without rebuilding the whole wallet from scratch
- Deployed live — anyone can look up the rules the wallet runs on and verify they haven't been changed
- A real critical bug was found and fixed before it could cause permanent damage — an emergency freeze that locked the owner out of their own wallet with no way back in
- 25 automated checks run before any change can go live — broken code is blocked automatically
OmniNode Infrastructure Manager
A system that runs two live blockchain nodes on one machine — Bitcoin and Ethereum — watches them around the clock, sends an alert the moment something goes wrong, and lets you control everything with one simple command. Nine separate parts working together. All automated. No manual checking required.
- Bitcoin and Ethereum nodes running at the same time on one machine — resource limits set automatically based on what hardware is available
- One command to start, stop, restart, or check the health of all eight parts of the system at once
- A live dashboard showing the status of every node, how far through the sync it is, how many connections it has, and alerts when something goes wrong
- Spins up a cloud server with the correct settings and storage attached — one command, no manual steps
- Sets up a fresh server from scratch automatically — 22 steps, zero manual work required
- Setup files included to run the whole system on a shared server cluster — tested and documented
Real-Time Blockchain(ETH) Txs Monitor
A system that watches every Ethereum transaction the moment it appears — before it's confirmed. Every transaction gets scored automatically. Unusual activity fires an alert. Money moving in circles gets flagged. Runs continuously with no manual checking required. Two display modes: a live scrolling feed or a structured dashboard with panels and totals.
- Picks up every transaction the moment it appears on the network — before it's confirmed
- Every transaction gets scored across five levels from ignore to critical — most serious always wins
- Two separate unusual-activity watchers: one for sudden bursts of transactions, one for fees running high over time
- Detects money moving in circles — follows the chain up to five steps back within the last hour, reports each unique loop once
- Spots transactions routed through hidden channels to avoid public visibility — flagged automatically
- Live dashboard or raw scrolling feed — you choose when you start. Runs with no screen or manual watching needed.
- 70 real transactions built into a demo mode — no account needed, produces real output every time
Neural Trace
A blockchain forensic investigation tool that traces wallet activity forward and backward across the Ethereum network. Built from personal loss — used in an active federal investigation. Generates court-ready reports for legal authorities.
- Follows money forward from one wallet — maps every wallet the money touched, up to 7 steps deep, automatically
- Works backwards too — finds where the money came from, including which exchange it passed through
- Watches all traced wallets over 48 hours or 7 days for new activity — spikes, structuring patterns, and wallets that were inactive for months before suddenly moving
- Automatically labels every wallet by what it's doing: collecting, passing through, mixing, bridging, or sitting at an exchange waiting to be cashed out
- Generates a Word document report ready to hand to a lawyer — structured tables, wallet records, and a written summary of findings. Reports have been submitted to federal attorneys in an active case.
- Login-protected — credentials are handled on the server, never visible in the browser source
- 38 automated checks run on startup — the system confirms everything is working correctly before any investigation begins
Skills Matrix
- Docker + Docker Compose
- Linux Administration (Ubuntu)
- Bitcoin Core Node Ops
- Geth (Ethereum) Node Ops
- Kubernetes (Minikube — local)
- Terraform (IaC — local development)
- Ansible (Config Management)
- Bash scripting (automation)
- systemd + cron + SSH
- Prometheus (metrics collection)
- Grafana (custom dashboards)
- Alertmanager (alert routing)
- Discord webhooks
- Container log export (timestamped, auto on shutdown)
- Structured logging
- Health watchdog (independent monitoring)
- Performance benchmarking
- Python (data pipelines, analysis)
- JavaScript / Node.js
- GitHub Actions (CI/CD)
- Automated testing (unit + integration)
- REST API integration
- WebSocket streaming (asyncio)
- Environment config management
- Report generation (JSON + DOCX)
- Credential management (.env, secrets)
- Access control implementation
- API key isolation
- Anomaly detection
- Behavioural pattern recognition
- Evidence handling
- Recirculation detection
- Restricted access control