Headline

Lead Software Engineer @ Zeta | System architect & hands-on technical lead, financial-grade distributed systems | Architected an EOD platform proven to close 208M+ accounts in under an hour | ex-Citi | NIT Durgapur

About

Backend architect and hands-on technical lead with 13+ years building financial-grade, high-throughput distributed systems. At Zeta I architected an end-of-day (EOD) accounting platform for credit instruments, proven in load tests and customer demos to close 208M+ accounts in under an hour at 1M / 100K peak TPS (processing / persistence) — a ~100× scale-up from a ~2M-account ceiling, achieved by decoupling processing from persistence so each scales independently. I own system design end-to-end and stay in the code: I design the architecture and build the hardest parts myself (for example the S3 + Athena + Apache Iceberg data-prep pipeline that cut nightly-close infra cost by ~70–85%), while setting engineering standards and mentoring a ~15-engineer platform group to adopt them (10+ engineers mentored to senior). Delivered to HDFC, ICICI, Axis (India) and PNC Bank (USA). Most recently I initiated and led org-wide adoption of agentic engineering tooling — conceiving and building the first three "agent-harness skills" myself, including the deployment pre-check the SRE team now runs before every release. Before Zeta: regulatory balance-sheet forecasting (CCAR) at Citi — configurable reference rates for the move off LIBOR, live runtime configuration, and a codebase taken from 0 to ~80% test coverage; and at Principal, modernising a COBOL/DB2 commission-and-payout platform into a modular Java application. Core stack: Java, Spring, SQL · PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis · Kafka, Apache Flink, Apache Iceberg, S3, Athena · AWS, Docker, Kubernetes · CI quality/security gates (Jenkins, SonarQube, Snyk), test automation, agentic/LLM tooling, cost optimisation. Open to Technical Lead, Staff/Principal Engineer and Architect roles on distributed systems and platforms — and to Engineering Manager roles where hands-on architecture still matters.

Location

Bengaluru

AI stack

claude code

claude

Work experience

Lead Software Engineer (System Architect / Technical Lead) at Zeta, Jan 2022 - Present · 4 yrs 9 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, System architect and hands-on technical lead — EOD accounting platform for credit instruments, in production at HDFC Bank. Technical direction of a ~15-engineer platform group. • Architected the EOD platform proven to close 208M+ accounts in under an hour at 1M / 100K peak TPS (processing / persistence) in load tests and customer demos — ~100× up from a ~2M ceiling, by decoupling processing from persistence. • Personally built the big-data data-prep pipeline (S3 + Athena + Apache Iceberg): 30 min / 100K accounts → <5 min / 200M+; nightly-close infra cost −70–85% vs a scale-up Postgres replica; pre-run prep removed live network-fault errors from the close. • Designed a reusable batch command framework (workers as pure functions emitting commands, persisted only on full-job success) — atomic close, independently scalable persistence; adopted org-wide. • Collapsed 18 per-worker deployments across 6 phases into one deployment with a linear per-phase runner. • Replaced a serverless real-time event processor (cold starts, slow scale-up) with an always-on, horizontally scaling Kafka-fed REST service plus cron retry over persisted failures — transient failures self-heal; only unhandleable ones reach a human. • Turned a per-call REST classification lookup into an in-process cached library (network hops to zero; adopted by every classifying system); cut account-creation setup latency ~4 s → <200 ms (~20×). • Built an extensible test-environment automation framework (bring-up → seed → execute → validate → tear-down): ~3-day manual validation → ~4 h (−95%). • Initiated and led org-wide adoption of agentic engineering tooling — conceived the first three skills: the de-facto SRE release pre-check, a code-review gate for AI-generated code, and Snyk auto-remediation. • Set org-wide standards: CI quality/security gates on every PR (Jenkins, SonarQube, Snyk); lean production logging. • Mentored 10+ engineers to senior.

Lead Software Engineer at Citi, Jun 2018 - Dec 2021 · 3 yrs 7 mos, Pune, Maharashtra, India, Technical lead — regulatory balance-sheet forecasting engine (US CCAR). • Made the forecasting engine's reference rate configurable — added transaction-based alternative rates alongside LIBOR/SOFR so the engine moves off LIBOR by configuration, not code. • Made runtime-tunable configuration live — changes apply at runtime with no application restart. • Decoupled input-data validation into a standalone precheck service, taking validation runtime off the forecasting run's critical path; runs proceed only on validated data. • Automated Long-Term-Debt risk calculation by integrating a third-party analytics engine in place of a manual Excel process (zero manual intervention), verified against seeded expected results with a repeatable regression suite. • Took the codebase from 0 to ~80% test coverage — set the standard, led the team to it, and enforced it with a JaCoCo coverage gate in the build.

Senior Analyst (Senior Software Engineer → Technical Lead) at Principal Financial Group, Mar 2014 - May 2018 · 4 yrs 3 mos, Pune Division, Maharashtra, India, End-to-end marketer services platform: onboarding, commission (variable-payout) calculation, statement generation, disbursement. De-facto tech lead of a ~6-person team — owned technical design, architecture and task breakdown. • Modernised the commission-calculation, statement and disbursement flows — migrated legacy COBOL/DB2 into a modular Java application, unifying separate flows and reducing statement/processing runtime (statement prep moved to MongoDB with a batched templating/dispatch component). • Redesigned marketer onboarding — a 20-form flow cut to 4 through reuse and redesign, cutting onboarding lead time.

Software Engineer at Mjunction Services ltd (SAIL-TATA Steel venture), Jul 2013 - Feb 2014 · 8 mos, Kolkata, West Bengal, India, Proprietary auction engine for SAIL to trade steel byproducts.

Education

Bachelor of Technology (BTech), Electrical Engg., National Institute of Technology Durgapur