---
title: "Aniket Tikalkar - Senior Software Engineer in Greater Bengaluru Area | Tal"
description: "Meet Aniket Tikalkar, Senior Software Engineer at PayPal | BITS Pilani | Distributed Systems | Microservices | System architecture | Transaction processing based in Greater Bengaluru Area. AI stack includes claude code, claude, and cursor."
image: "https://tal.club/meet/aniket-tikalkar/share-image"
---

# Aniket Tikalkar on Tal

## 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

[View the original profile](https://tal.club/meet/aniket-tikalkar)

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