Pratik Agarwal, Figma
Modern systems often default to HTTP-based RPC frameworks like gRPC—but at high message rates, those abstractions can become the bottleneck. At Momento, Pratik and team built Protosocket, a lightweight, message-oriented layer over raw TCP that avoids the overhead of HTTP, gRPC, and WebSockets. By rethinking synchronization and message flow, they achieved 3× throughput, reduced server count by 65% and client side latencies by 70%. This talk explores how stripping away layers of abstraction can unlock surprising efficiency gains in production systems.
Pratik is a distributed systems engineer at Figma, where he architects and scales infrastructure that powers millions of designers and developers worldwide. With deep expertise spanning the entire backend stack - from client SDKs to storage systems - he has consistently delivered transformational performance improvements and cost optimizations across his career. Previously, Pratik worked at Momento on caching and high performance, databases at DynamoDB, and event processing at AWS Marketplace.
author = {Pratik Agarwal},
title = {How We Built Protosockets to Go Beyond {HTTP} and {gRPC}},
year = {2026},
address = {Seattle, WA},
publisher = {USENIX Association},
month = mar
}
