Akshay Gaikwad

Here's a concise, FAANG-style About Me section suitable for job applications, LinkedIn, or company profiles:

> I am a Senior Backend Software Engineer with 7+ years of experience designing and building large-scale distributed systems, high-throughput backend platforms, and mission-critical financial applications. My expertise lies in Java, distributed systems, event-driven architectures, microservices, and performance engineering, with a strong focus on reliability, observability, and operational excellence. I enjoy solving complex scalability problems, building resilient production systems, and driving end-to-end technical initiatives while mentoring engineers and collaborating across cross-functional teams.

I am passionate about building products that operate at internet scale and deliver measurable business impact.

Senior Software Engineer at PhonePe (2024-09 – Present)

• Owned the design and development of a production-grade distributed backend platform on top of an existing workflow orchestration system, enabling high-throughput APIs (10k+ RPS) powering large-scale backend services across multiple teams and user-facing chatbot applications serving hundreds of millions of users.
• Led cross-functional collaboration with product, frontend and content teams to evolve a rule-based PhonePe chatbot into a configurable GenAI based conversational system, enabling controlled rollouts, A/B experiments and data-driven feedback loops to improve user engagement, conversion and overall product experience
• Reduced the TTFB tail latency from ~3–4s to ~400ms for chatbot service improving user experience for web and mobile clients.
• Built an intelligent dynamic load management framework for a multi-tenant AI chatbot platform, enabling priority-based request admission and resilient overload protection across infra and downstream services.
• Executed large-scale stateful data migrations and backfills (~10 TB, ~80B rows), ensuring metadata integrity, handling schema evolution and encrypted payloads and maintaining backward compatibility with at-least-once processing and zero-downtime cutovers.
• Leveraged production telemetry and observability to troubleshoot distributed system bottlenecks and production issues, performed root cause analysis and optimized JVM memory management, connection pools, reducing p95 latency by ~30% under peak production traffic.
• Led the end-to-end execution of disaster recovery (DR) for a high-RPS microservice (Optimus) on on-prem infrastructure, coordinating cross-region migration of critical infrastructure (MariaDB, RabbitMQ, Aerospike), upstream/downstream dependency cutovers and kill-switch strategies to enable controlled downtime and full recovery (MTTR ~10 minutes).
• Contributed to architecture reviews, mentored junior engineers, drove code quality through reviews, proper unit and integration testing and promoted knowledge sharing through documentation and CSX pod tech talks.

Senior Software Engineer (Technical Lead) at Jiraaf (2022-10 – 2024-08)

• Spearheaded the end-to-end design and development of correctness first and reliability focussed trading APIs powering Invoice Discounting and Corporate Bond asset classes supporting repayments, critical settlement paths, interest accruals and portfolio tracking and driving the platform's primary revenue streams (~90% of total platform revenue).
• Designed distributed, event-driven notification platform with asynchronous messaging, user preferences and priority-aware processing, templating, rate limiting enabling reliable, low-latency delivery of millions of multi-channel notifications with high availability.

Software Engineer II at Kachow - Amplywealth Solutions Pvt Ltd (2021-12 – 2022-10)

• Architected and developed distributed backend services for Global Search, Media, and Leaderboard, leveraging AWS ECS, Amazon MSK, DynamoDB (DAX), SQS, ElastiCache, RDS, and S3 to deliver sub-100ms p95 response latency under peak production traffic.
• Improved PostgreSQL performance for heavy computation paths by analyzing query plans, designing covering indexes, optimizing join strategies, and implementing efficient data access patterns, reducing p95 query latency by ~60% while consistently meeting <100ms SLA.
• Collaborated with frontend teams to deliver React-based UI features consuming backend APIs for mobile and web clients.

Software Engineer 2 | Software Engineer at Accolite | Morgan Stanley (2019-06 – 2021-12)

• Led the development of the onboarding platform for HNI clients at Morgan Stanley, incorporating privacy-by-design practices, consent management and regulatory compliance, across diverse demographics, improving client onboarding time by ~40%.
• Engineered a highly extensible, robust Payment Gateways integration platform with an easy plug-and-play mechanism for Prudential Southeast Asia, improving onboarding time by around 60%.

B.Tech in Information Technology – NIT Kurukshetra (2019)