i.
Don't romanticize code.
The real job is breaking down problems, spotting patterns, and delivering the right solution — code or otherwise.
Ankit Raj.
Builds systems that ship, survive, and scale.
6+ years building distributed systems across Procurement, Receivables & CRM.
Java
Python
Spring Boot
Webflux
JPA / Hibernate
jOOQ
Flyway
REST
GraphQL
OAuth2 / JWT
JUnit
Mockito
Maven
Gradle
Git
MySQL
Postgres
pgVector
Redis
RabbitMQ
Ollama
SQS
SNS
EventBridge
Bedrock
EC2
S3
Route 53
SES
CloudFront
Docker
Linux
Jenkins
Argo CD
Grafana
Prometheus
OpenTelemetry
Microservices
Event-driven
Reactive / Async
Concurrency
Resilience patterns
Distributed systems
RAG
Vector Embeddings
Semantic Search
Clustering
Cosine Similarity
Prompt Engineering
01 — About
The short version.
Seasoned backend engineer with diverse experience across SaaS teams like Jaggaer, LeadSquared, and HighRadius. I specialise in building systems that handle messy data, third-party integrations, event-driven pipelines, and legacy system migrations.
I bring a strong product mindset and solid proficiency in cloud, DevOps, and AI, enabling me to collaborate effectively and deliver end-to-end solutions.
years of experience in building production-grade systems
Philosophy
ii.
Readable code is non-negotiable.
Intent-revealing code, structured design, and documentation are the backbone of fast, efficient team collaboration.
iii.
Engineering is a team sport.
Clear articulation, communicating, negotiating, and delegation will always outperform individual heroics.
02 — Experience
What I've shipped.
Building Catelyze — a scalable cross-platform integration system enabling seamless admin configuration, real-time dashboards, and high-throughput data flow across services.
Re-architecting a Fragile Legacy System
Re-architected tightly coupled third-party integrations into a dedicated microservice layer — enabling isolation, independent scaling, and failure containment.
- Built a shared resilience library adopted across microservices: retry strategies, rate limiting, circuit breakers, and DLQs
- Introduced backpressure handling and fallback mechanisms for external API calls
- Reduced integration-related production incidents by ~99%
High-Throughput Event-Driven Data Pipeline
Engineered an event-driven data sync pipeline to migrate and stream procurement data (requisitions, bidding, auctions) from legacy to new systems.
- Handled 2,000+ events/sec reliably
- Built using ExecutorService + RabbitMQ for concurrent processing and fault tolerance
- Designed for idempotency, ordering, and failure recovery
Admin Console & Real-Time Insights
Developed a centralised admin console for configuration management and operational visibility.
- Real-time dashboards powered by core services behind a gateway
- Handled 1,000+ RPS with optimised APIs and caching strategies
- Enabled non-engineering teams to manage configurations without deployments
Built Service CRM — a ticketing and helpdesk system to streamline client customer support workflows across multiple communication channels.
Event-Driven Email System
Built a high-throughput email microservice integrating multiple ESPs like SendGrid, AWS SES, and Gmail.
- Processed 10K+ emails/day with rate limiting (Bucket4j) to prevent provider throttling
- Automated retry and failure handling using EventBridge, SNS, and SQS
- Added AI-driven spam detection and Redis caching for deliverability and performance
- Integrated monitoring (Micrometer) and observability dashboards
Multi-Channel Notification Platform
Developed a factory-pattern-based notification service supporting Email, SMS, and WhatsApp.
- Handled 50K+ notifications/day across channels
- Unified abstraction layer for easy extensibility of new providers
- Built-in retry, monitoring, and failure recovery mechanisms
- Delivered operational visibility via a centralised dashboard
Operational & Product Improvements
Focused on system reliability, cost efficiency, and product scalability:
- Protected email IP reputation by detecting risky usage patterns and quarantining abusive accounts
- Built automated client usage tracking enabling usage-based pricing and data-driven product decisions
- Standardised trunk-based development with weekly releases, including rollback strategies for safer and faster deployments
Electronic Invoicing & Cash Application — contributed to building systems that automate Accounts Receivable workflows, improving payment processing efficiency and reducing manual intervention.
Engineering Impact
Focused on reliability, scale, and correctness in high-volume financial systems:
- Reduced payment failures by 10–12% by implementing L3 credit card payment flows and fixing inter-service integration gaps
- Built a high-throughput payment file parser processing 1B+ records/year, coupled with a concurrent rule engine using ExecutorService
- Developed a correspondence configuration management service handling 1M+ records/year, enabling flexible client-specific workflows
Product Ownership & Execution
Stepped beyond engineering to drive product outcomes end-to-end:
- Owned and built an internal utility product (1,000+ DAU) from problem discovery to MVP and scale
- Led stakeholder discussions, requirement shaping, and feature prioritisation
- Improved bandwidth utilisation by 10% and implementation speed by 5%
- Drove adoption by stabilising the product post-launch and optimising based on dashboard CTR and usage metrics
03 — Selected Work
Featured projects.
Inbox Intelligence
Personal project · In progress
An end-to-end email intelligence pipeline that ingests, processes, and understands emails — grouping and labelling them by meaning, not keywords. Built to replace static inbox rules with adaptive, AI-driven organisation.
Ingester
Gmail Pipeline & Data Extraction
- Idempotent ingestion via Gmail's history-id watermark and deterministic content hashes
- HTML/markup sanitisation — strips noise, extracts meaningful text
- Persists cleaned emails + metadata for downstream embedding
Processor
Embeddings, Similarity & Clustering
- Ollama (
nomic-embed-text) for on-device embedding — no data leaves the machine - pgVector storage + cosine similarity search
- DBSCAN clustering — automatic group discovery, no predefined categories
AI Layer
Labelling, Feedback & Future
- LLM-powered labelling from representative cluster samples
- Adaptive feedback loop — user actions refine clusters over time
Smart summaries, priority scoring, auto-triage rules
Product Manager Fellowship
NextLeap · 2023
Product skills complement engineering capabilities — hence this certification. Solved real-world product problems through strong product thinking, user research, and metric-driven execution.
Increasing Reviews on Zomato
- User research with 100+ respondents showed 50% of frequent users lacked incentive to write reviews
- Designed a gamification system with redeemable virtual coins targeting 2.1M users, with spam-mitigation built in
- End-to-end solution: wireframes, system architecture, and review-to-order ratio as the success metric
Subscriber Growth for YouTube Music
- Research with 200+ respondents identified missing equalizer/crossfade as a blocker for 33% of upgrades
- Designed an AI-powered equalizer that adapts to listening history
- Wireframes, architecture, completion-rate metric, and a plan for the cold-start problem
DevOps Certification
GeeksForGeeks · 2025
Exposure to Cloud & DevOps practices, so that I don't sound like a fool in team meetings.
Automated CI/CD Pipeline for Portfolio Deployment
- GitHub Actions pipeline for automated portfolio deploys
- S3 for storage, CloudFront for CDN + cache invalidation
- Route 53 for DNS, ACM for TLS — secure by default
04 — Education
Where it started.
Bachelor of Technology · Computer Science & Engineering
Kalinga Institute Of Industrial Technology
05 — Contact
Let's build something good.
Hiring for a backend role, scoping a hard distributed-systems problem, or just want to compare notes on resilience patterns? My inbox is open.
rja.ankit@gmail.com