Pooja Thanekar

Senior Backend Engineer with 8.5+ years of experience building scalable, distributed systems using Golang, Kafka, Redis, MongoDB, and cloud-native technologies. Actively transitioning into GenAI-integrated backend engineering with hands-on experience in LLM application development, RAG architectures, vector databases, and Agentic AI workflows, and seeking roles at the intersection of robust backend engineering and intelligent AI systems.

Senior Backend Engineer - Kotak Securities - Pune, India

(2024-01)

• Developed a high-throughput Research Recommendation Platform using Golang, Kafka, Redis, and MongoDB, serving real-time financial research to thousands of users.
• Designed Kafka-based event pipelines for asynchronous recommendation generation.
• Explored and prototyped GenAI-powered recommendation explainability using LLMs (OpenAI APIs) and RAG architecture to surface context-aware, human-readable rationales for stock recommendations.
• Built a RAG-based research retrieval system integrating vector database concepts and LangChain to enable semantic search over financial documents.
• Collaborated with data and product teams to define AI integration points within existing backend infrastructure.

Senior Backend Engineer - Encora Technologies - Pune, India

(2022-12 - 2024-01)

• Developed GCP resource discovery and monitoring solutions in Golang, enabling automated visibility into cloud infrastructure for enterprise clients.
• Implemented automated alerting and monitoring pipelines using GCP-native services.
• Contributed to system design reviews, improving service reliability, and reducing incident response time.

Backend Engineer - Opcito Technologies - Pune, India

(2022-04 - 2022-12)

• Designed and delivered cloud-native backend applications in Golang following microservices and 12-factor app principles.
• Developed containerized services using Docker and Kubernetes, enabling seamless CI/CD deployments.

Backend Engineer - Josh Software - Pune, India

(2020-04 - 2022-04)

• Built secure access control and role-based authorization systems for enterprise backend APIs in Golang.
• Designed RESTful API layers with well-defined authentication and permission models for multi-tenant applications.

Software Developer - MKCL (Maharashtra Knowledge Corporation Ltd.) - Pune, India

(2017-07 - 2020-04)

• Developed backend modules for E-learning platforms serving thousands of students across Maharashtra.
• Built data management and reporting APIs, improving administrative efficiency for course and user management.
• Participated in full SDLC: requirements gathering, development, testing, and deployment.

B.Tech - Computer Science Engineering - Rajarambapu Institute of Technology, Sangli (2014 - 2017)

Diploma - Computer Engineering - Dr. D.Y. Patil Polytechnic (2011 - 2014)