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Aniket Tikalkar

Senior Software Engineer at PayPal | BITS Pilani | Distributed Systems | Microservices | System architecture | Transaction processing

Greater Bengaluru Area

7+ years of work experience

PayPal
Feb 20233 yrs 8 mosPresent

Bengaluru

• $20 million TPV unlocked in Phase 1 by architecting Progressive Onboarding from scratch as Tech Lead, designed event-driven state machine for multi-jurisdiction compliance, led 5-engineer pod, drove alignment with PM/Risk/Legal and activated 50K merchants including partners like Meta and Wix. • Cut daemon regression cycle from 4 days to 2 hours by designing Flexter integration for daemon components from scratch, replaced flaky functional test suites with live-traffic tap-and-replay, adopted across 4 teams at PayPal. • 20K+ Shopify merchants onboarded in 3 months and 7,000+ daily FCI eliminated by re-architecting payment lifecycle and designing Shopify’s Flexible Liability framework, led team of 4, led rollout with Risk and Ops, dropped escalations to near-zero. • Engineered Zettle Cash integration for post-payments across US, UK, Germany, France, and Netherlands, built a resilient pipeline instrumented with distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), processing $1.2 million weekly TPV at 750 ms p99 per transaction, advancing PayPal’s omnichannel strategy. • 30% reduction in transaction failures and 22+ recurring incidents resolved as appointed STP Champion, owned cross-functional remediation across Engineering, Ops, and Support; improved MTTR by 15% and established remediation playbook adopted by sister teams.
PayPal
May 20211 yr 9 mosJan 2023

Chennai

• Implemented backup disbursement for guest refunds with automated onboarding, leveraging asynchronous processing and durable message queues, improved guest refund success rate by 8% and converted 80% of those guest users into registered PayPal users. • Developed global bank payout capability for dispute resolution, enabled $300K daily disbursements with automated retries, idempotent operations, and end-to-end consistency across transaction life cycles like fast funds, delayed settlements, bank rejects. • Refactored core payment components to propagate security context across 5 services and 40 onboarded APIs, enabling standardized data access, closed authorization gaps and mitigated data leakage risks across 45 million transactions per day. • Delivered reverse payout from card system for dispute resolution, owned API contract and cross-team rollout with go-live checks, pipeline moved $500K weekly TPV with 850 ms p99 latency meeting compliance requirements.
PayPal
Aug 20191 yr 9 mosApr 2021

Chennai Area, India

• Advanced the base build-out of JAVA based orchestration microservice migrating a C++ monolith, now powers 30 APIs and 40 million transactions per day with 920 ms p99 latency, delivering fault-tolerant reliability, concurrency control and lower infra costs. • Designed and implemented a microservice for real-time transaction correction. Streamlined operations, cutting overhead by 90% and expedited correction SLA from 8 hours to under 2 minutes per transaction. • Migrated reimbursement capability (10,000 requests/day) from C++ monolith to Spring Boot (JAVA) microservice, achieving zero downtime, 100% backward compatibility, and 5% p99 latency optimization.
HSBC
Jan 20196 mosJun 2019

Greater Bengaluru Area

Automated SaaS-based risk data pipeline in Python processing 600K records with filtering, validation, parsing, analytics, and decision-tree logic that helped cut analysis time from 6 hours to under 4 minutes, earning recognition from Regional Heads and Leadership.
ECLIPSE INSTRUMENTATION PVT. LTD.
Apr 20173 mosJun 2017

Mumbai Metropolitan Region

*Developed a prototype application to control light intensity in surgical lights used in operation theatres. *Worked on the hardware and firmware side using AVR Microcontroller, Arduino, and ESP8266 Wi-Fi module. *Designed and implemented a sample user interface for real-time control of the light system. *Collaborated with the research team to integrate circuit design with software controls.

Aniket’s AI Stack

claude code
claude code
claude
claude
cursor
cursor
mcp
mcp
obsidian
obsidian
openai
openai

Education

Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani - Goa Campus

Bachelor's degree

Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani - Goa Campus

20154 yrs2019

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Headline

Senior Software Engineer at PayPal | BITS Pilani | Distributed Systems | Microservices | System architecture | Transaction processing

About

Backend-focused engineer with a strong focus on designing scalable, reliable systems. I’m passionate about building clean, configurable, and extensible architectures that power products at scale. I enjoy simplifying complexity, driving product-aligned engineering decisions, and bringing clarity to ambiguous problem spaces. I’m also deeply invested in mentoring and helping teams grow through strong technical direction and collaborative leadership.

Location

Greater Bengaluru Area

AI stack

claude code

claude

cursor

mcp

obsidian

openai

Work experience

Senior Software Engineer at PayPal, Feb 2023 - Present · 3 yrs 8 mos, Bengaluru, • $20 million TPV unlocked in Phase 1 by architecting Progressive Onboarding from scratch as Tech Lead, designed event-driven state machine for multi-jurisdiction compliance, led 5-engineer pod, drove alignment with PM/Risk/Legal and activated 50K merchants including partners like Meta and Wix. • Cut daemon regression cycle from 4 days to 2 hours by designing Flexter integration for daemon components from scratch, replaced flaky functional test suites with live-traffic tap-and-replay, adopted across 4 teams at PayPal. • 20K+ Shopify merchants onboarded in 3 months and 7,000+ daily FCI eliminated by re-architecting payment lifecycle and designing Shopify’s Flexible Liability framework, led team of 4, led rollout with Risk and Ops, dropped escalations to near-zero. • Engineered Zettle Cash integration for post-payments across US, UK, Germany, France, and Netherlands, built a resilient pipeline instrumented with distributed tracing (OpenTelemetry), processing $1.2 million weekly TPV at 750 ms p99 per transaction, advancing PayPal’s omnichannel strategy. • 30% reduction in transaction failures and 22+ recurring incidents resolved as appointed STP Champion, owned cross-functional remediation across Engineering, Ops, and Support; improved MTTR by 15% and established remediation playbook adopted by sister teams.

Software Engineer 2 at PayPal, May 2021 - Jan 2023 · 1 yr 9 mos, Chennai, • Implemented backup disbursement for guest refunds with automated onboarding, leveraging asynchronous processing and durable message queues, improved guest refund success rate by 8% and converted 80% of those guest users into registered PayPal users. • Developed global bank payout capability for dispute resolution, enabled $300K daily disbursements with automated retries, idempotent operations, and end-to-end consistency across transaction life cycles like fast funds, delayed settlements, bank rejects. • Refactored core payment components to propagate security context across 5 services and 40 onboarded APIs, enabling standardized data access, closed authorization gaps and mitigated data leakage risks across 45 million transactions per day. • Delivered reverse payout from card system for dispute resolution, owned API contract and cross-team rollout with go-live checks, pipeline moved $500K weekly TPV with 850 ms p99 latency meeting compliance requirements.

Software Engineer 1 at PayPal, Aug 2019 - Apr 2021 · 1 yr 9 mos, Chennai Area, India, • Advanced the base build-out of JAVA based orchestration microservice migrating a C++ monolith, now powers 30 APIs and 40 million transactions per day with 920 ms p99 latency, delivering fault-tolerant reliability, concurrency control and lower infra costs. • Designed and implemented a microservice for real-time transaction correction. Streamlined operations, cutting overhead by 90% and expedited correction SLA from 8 hours to under 2 minutes per transaction. • Migrated reimbursement capability (10,000 requests/day) from C++ monolith to Spring Boot (JAVA) microservice, achieving zero downtime, 100% backward compatibility, and 5% p99 latency optimization.

Traded Risk at HSBC, Jan 2019 - Jun 2019 · 6 mos, Greater Bengaluru Area, Automated SaaS-based risk data pipeline in Python processing 600K records with filtering, validation, parsing, analytics, and decision-tree logic that helped cut analysis time from 6 hours to under 4 minutes, earning recognition from Regional Heads and Leadership.

Electrical Engineer at ECLIPSE INSTRUMENTATION PVT. LTD., Apr 2017 - Jun 2017 · 3 mos, Mumbai Metropolitan Region, *Developed a prototype application to control light intensity in surgical lights used in operation theatres. *Worked on the hardware and firmware side using AVR Microcontroller, Arduino, and ESP8266 Wi-Fi module. *Designed and implemented a sample user interface for real-time control of the light system. *Collaborated with the research team to integrate circuit design with software controls.

Education

Bachelor's degree, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani - Goa Campus