Headline

Backend & Applied AI Engineer | Java 21, Spring Boot, Python | RAG, pgvector, Local LLM Inference | SDE III @ American Express | AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate

About

I'm a backend engineer with ~5 years of experience building production systems in Java and Python — currently at American Express, where I'm driving backend design and implementation for the modernization of a corporate onboarding platform serving 15+ international markets: migrating a legacy Spring Web application to Spring Boot on Java 21, redesigning the persistence layer from IBM DB2 to PostgreSQL, and building an immutable, thread-safe architecture on Virtual Threads with Docker and GitHub Actions CI/CD. Before Amex, I built fintech backends in Python — asynchronous Flask APIs for KYC, onboarding, lending, and transaction processing at Decentro (YC-backed), and distributed orchestration systems on AWS Step Functions, SQS, Lambda, and Celery at ConsultAdd. Alongside my professional work, I independently build Applied AI and LLM systems with a backend engineer's bias toward reliability: → FleetPilot — a RAG platform for automotive service knowledge: transcript and OEM-manual ingestion via Redis Streams consumer groups, SentenceTransformers embeddings into PostgreSQL + pgvector, citation-aware retrieval, transaction-safe SQLAlchemy persistence, and a React monitoring dashboard. (github.com/rutvikkapade/fleetAI) → fAInance — an on-device financial insights app: quantized GGUF models running through llama.cpp entirely on-device in React Native, extracting SMS transaction data into schema-validated structured outputs with zero data egress. → A generative media orchestration pipeline: deterministic multi-stage chaining of TTS, diffusion-based video generation, and lip-sync processing, batch-executed across 30+ scripts with voice-consistency controls and timing markers. What I care about in AI systems is the same thing I care about in backend systems: validation, state, idempotency, and predictable behavior — LLMs as components inside well-engineered software, not the other way around. AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate. Open to backend-heavy Applied AI, LLM application, AI platform, and agent engineering roles.

Location

Bangalore Urban

AI stack

codex

cursor

hugging face

langchain

langgraph

ollama

Work experience

Software Engineer III at American Express, Jun 2026 - Present · 3 mos, Bengaluru, Driving backend design and implementation for the modernization of a corporate onboarding platform serving 15+ international markets for Amex card and financial product onboarding workflows. • Migrating a legacy Spring Web application on standalone Tomcat to Spring Boot with embedded Tomcat on Java 21, replacing SOAP-era integration patterns with versioned REST APIs. • Designed an immutable, thread-safe backend architecture using Virtual Threads, Command Pattern, Records, and Builders with asynchronous processing workflows. • Redesigned the persistence layer from IBM DB2 to PostgreSQL, lifting business logic out of stored procedures into a Spring Data / ORM-driven service layer. • Containerized the stack with Docker and built GitHub Actions CI/CD pipelines, standardizing builds and releases across environments.

Software Engineer II at American Express, Nov 2024 - Jun 2026 · 1 yr 8 mos, Bangalore Urban, ● Contributing to the modernization of customer onboarding for American Express across key international markets, including the US, UK, Mexico, Singapore, India, Australia, New Zealand, Spain, Japan, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, and Canada. ● Modernization & Scalability: Upgrading UI components and enhancing backend architecture using One Data (Vert.x – Java) and One App (React), ensuring robust, scalable, and adaptable systems across diverse regulatory and market landscapes. ● Legacy to Cloud-Native Migration: Spearheaded the migration from JBoss EAP to Apache Tomcat 9, reducing runtime overhead and compute consumption by stripping away unused enterprise subsystems (EJB, JCA, Infinispan, etc.) . This shift: ->Lowered CPU and memory footprint by ~30–40% compared to JBoss, improving container density on shared clusters. ->Simplified deployment pipelines with lightweight server.xml/context.xml configs instead of heavy standalone.xml profiles. ->Improved startup times and reduced operational complexity, enabling faster recovery and scale-out. ● Developer Experience Modernization: Transformed the local development workflow from traditional IDE run configs to a Docker-based buildpack setup post-migration. Developers can now simply clone & run onboarding modules with consistent containerized environments, eliminating “works on my machine” issues and cutting local environment setup time from hours to minutes. ● Developer Productivity & Security Automation: Designed and shipped a Unified Vulnerability Dashboard (Flask + OneApp React) that aggregates findings from IRIS, DotConnector, and SonarQube, enabling teams to directly generate Jira and Rally tickets. This cut down vulnerability triage effort by ~40% and accelerated compliance readiness. ● Cross-Market Feature Enhancements: Implemented onboarding features tailored to regional compliance while maintaining global consistency, reducing duplication and improving maintainability across markets.

Software Development Engineer at Decentro, Jun 2024 - Oct 2024 · 5 mos, Bengaluru, • Developed asynchronous Python/Flask APIs and backend services for KYC, onboarding, lending, and transaction processing consumed by external merchant developers. • Built backend and pricing systems in Python on AWS EC2 with read-replica-backed data access for high-throughput merchant workloads. • Implemented CI/CD pipelines with AWS CodePipeline and Bitbucket.

Software Engineer L1 at ConsultAdd Inc, Jul 2022 - Jun 2024 · 2 yrs, Pune District, • Built distributed orchestration systems in Python on AWS Step Functions, SQS, and Lambda with event-driven, asynchronous processing across long-running multi-step workflows. • Implemented asynchronous task execution using Celery with Redis-backed worker pools; deployed and scaled containerized microservices on ECS, ECR, Docker, and API Gateway. • Delivered backend APIs, infrastructure automation, and cloud-native services for client-facing platforms.

Software Engineer Intern at ConsultAdd Inc, Nov 2021 - Jun 2022 · 8 mos, Pune, Maharashtra, India

Software Developer Intern at MyHashCode, Sep 2021 - Nov 2021 · 3 mos, Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India

Education

Bachelor of Technology - BTech, Computer Science, Shri Vaishnav Vidyapeeth Vishwavidyalaya, Indore

HSC, PCM + Computer Science + Information Practices, Defence Public School - Jaipur

Public links

github: https://github.com/rutvikkapade

leetcode: https://leetcode.com/rutvikkapade