Nikhil Shinde

8+ years building and owning backend platforms for global payments and SaaS products as a founding engineer and technical lead. I set architecture direction that multiple product teams build on — from billing-data infrastructure and settlement systems to event-driven microservices — and own outcomes end-to-end, from system design through incident prevention. Proven at turning 0-to-1 platforms into revenue ($500K+ ARR) while operating at PCI-DSS Level 1 compliance and 99.95% uptime, and at raising the wider engineering bar through standards, mentoring, and code-review culture.

Founding Engineer & Tech Lead at PortOne Inc. (2021-03 – Present)

• Billing Data Platform (cross-team foundation): Defined and owned the billing-data architecture and data pipeline powering merchant billing and automated charging across the platform — a cross-cutting foundation that multiple product teams build on — and automated the recurring billing and charging workflow end-to-end, removing manual intervention from the revenue-critical path.
• Distributed Systems Architecture: Set the architecture direction for an event-driven system of 10+ microservices on AWS powering payments and crypto products at scale (REST, gRPC, async messaging via Kafka); led org-wide system design reviews and architecture decisions that other teams built against, sustaining high-frequency data ingestion at 99.95% uptime.
• Multi-Tenant Payments Platform: Founding engineer on CHAIPort, PortOne’s payment-orchestration platform; architected and owned the customer-facing products — Master-Merchant, Payment Links, Payment Pages, Invoices, SSO, and Audit Logs — the primary interface for a multi-tenant commercial ecosystem, with SSO and role-based access control (RBAC) for tenant isolation, directly contributing to $500K+ in ARR.
• 0-to-1 Product & Market Expansion: As a founding team member, built the merchant console and PSP integration pipeline from scratch, then launched new payments products across Vietnam, Thailand, and other Southeast Asian markets.
• Unified Abstraction Layer & Automation: Built a unified integration layer normalizing 10+ diverse third-party marketplace APIs (Amazon, Shopee, Lazada) into a vendor-agnostic settlement interface, later automating ingestion with a production agentic/LLM pipeline (Anthropic API); adopted as the org’s reconciliation standard, cutting manual effort 90% and opening $10K MRR.
• Reliability, Security & Cost: Owned the full incident lifecycle (root-cause analysis and prevention); achieved ISO / PCI-DSS Level 1 & 2 compliance and drove a 30% infrastructure cost reduction ($150K+ savings) through autoscaling and workload rightsizing.
• Engineering Leadership: As Founding Engineer and Product Owner, led a cross-functional team of 5 and mentored 3 engineers to senior-level roles; established the org’s coding standards, CI/CD pipelines, and code-review culture (100+ reviews), partnering with product, compliance, and business stakeholders.

Senior Software Development Engineer (Full Stack) at Playpower Labs Inc. (2018-06 – 2021-02)

• Scalable Backend Platform: Led backend development of a Gamification Engine serving 200K+ students across 100+ schools; improved measured student engagement by 40%.
• Architecture Modernisation: Engineered a GraphQL-based BFF service, decomposing a monolith to support 100K+ DAU at 99.9% uptime.
• Adaptive Learning Algorithm: Implemented a Computerised Adaptive Testing (CAT) algorithm; delivered measurable K-12 math fluency gains within 3 weeks of deployment.

Software Development Engineering Intern at MAQ Software (2018-01 – 2018-05)

• Data Pipeline & Performance: Built a data ingestion pipeline and Power BI dashboards for 1M+ Microsoft OPC customers; re-engineered SQL procedures with parallel processing for a 3× performance gain on TB-scale daily workloads.

Student Developer – Checker Framework, TLA+ Foundation at Google Summer of Code (2017 & 2018) (2017 – 2018)

• Open-Source Contribution (two-time selection): Selected twice for Google’s global open-source program — Checker Framework (2017) and TLA+ Foundation (2018). Authored annotated libraries cutting nullness errors by 80% in Apache Commons; raised test coverage of the TLA+ Toolbox to prevent regressions as new features shipped.

Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science & Engineering – Institute of Technology, Nirma University (2014 – 2018)