Akhilesh Maloo

Summary

Staff software engineer with 13+ years of experience designing and operating high-scale distributed systems across platform infrastructure, real-time messaging, and payments. Deep expertise in Java/Spring Boot, Kafka, gRPC, and Kubernetes with a consistent focus on reliability, scalability, and developer experience. Strong track record of owning Tier-0 services end-to-end — from architecture through production operations — while driving org-wide improvements in deployment safety, observability, and operational efficiency. Actively leveraging AI-powered automation to accelerate incident response and developer productivity.

Experience

Lead Member of Technical Staff — Platform Engineering December 2023 — Present

• Own and operate 3 Tier-0 and 2 Tier-1 platform services powering the real-time conversation platform — including a durable key-value store, an SSE-based event routing service, and a singleton key-distribution service — deployed on Kubernetes.
• Maintain a core shared library (app starter) adopted by 75+ services across the service stack, serving as the foundational dependency for the organization’s microservice ecosystem.
• Enhanced the Event Bus Starter library with bi-directional streaming and batch event processing, reducing latency from ~7s to ~200ms and increasing throughput from 20 to 1,000 events/sec.
• Led Spring Boot 3.4 / JDK 17 upgrade across platform services and shared libraries, achieving security compliance and unblocking 75+ downstream services from modernizing their stack.
• Drove migration of all platform services to Helm add-on and Argo Rollout, enabling canary deployments that reduced blast radius for production releases; now advising other teams on safe adoption.
• Architected bucket-snapshot handoff mechanism for the persistence layer, enabling seamless state transfers during restarts and rebalancing to support 100K concurrent conversations.
• Built automated Grafana dashboards integrated with SLO exporters, enabling self-service onboarding for new services and improving pager-duty investigation and resolution times.
• Resolved critical GovCloud deployment blockers (BouncyCastle/OpenSAML incompatibilities) and patched time-sensitive 3PP vulnerabilities across production services.
• Led production buildouts, moratorium exit criteria, and incremental rollout configuration with performance testing for safe, phased deployments.
• Built AI-powered automation (50+ multi-agent skills) for incident triage, deployment monitoring, and oncall diagnostics — reducing routine operational toil and enabling faster resolution across the team.

Lead Member of Technical Staff — Messaging November 2021 — March 2023

• Architected and built gRPC microservices for the conversation messaging platform — Send Message, Transfer, Conference, Typing Indicators, Read/Delivery Receipts — on a distributed, multi-tier system using Kafka, gRPC, and SSE.
• Delivered full-stack real-time messaging UI in the Salesforce Lightning framework, achieving sub-millisecond push communications.
• Developed an availability framework for front-end and back-end services, maintaining 99.95% uptime across component features.
• Built and maintained 90% code coverage through unit, functional, integration, and disruptive testing.

Staff Software Engineer March 2023 — December 2023

• Led cross-functional delivery of Bank Search and FX Payment Processing features, driving international payments expansion for the platform.
• Designed and built well-documented APIs for international payment workflows, serving both internal teams and external integrators.
• Implemented comprehensive monitoring and alerting on Splunk and Datadog, enabling proactive detection of performance degradation and critical incidents.

Software Engineer March 2018 — November 2021

• Developed and scaled the checkout platform handling 200M+ API calls/day, 10M+ checkouts/day, and 36 client integrations.
• Integrated external payment providers (Adyen, PayPal, Klarna, Apple Pay, Google Pay, Afterpay) into the checkout pipeline.
• Spearheaded cache integration that reduced response time by 30% and database load by 20% — awarded Spot Award for initiative.
• Built automated deployment pipelines (ECD) improving continuous integration practices across the team.

Sr. Associate Consultant January 2015 — August 2016

• Designed and developed Java web applications; owned testing cycle with automation tooling.

System Analyst April 2011 — January 2015

• Business and systems analysis: requirements modeling, process mapping, UAT administration.

Skills

Languages & Frameworks: Java, Spring Boot, J2EE, JavaScript, Angular, HTML/CSS, PHP, Node.js

Data & Messaging: Kafka, MySQL, MongoDB, Cassandra, Oracle SQL

APIs & Protocols: gRPC, REST, SOAP, SSE

Infrastructure & CI/CD: Kubernetes, Helm, Argo Rollouts, AWS (S3), Docker, Jenkins, Maven

Observability: Splunk, Datadog, Grafana

AI & Automation: Multi-Agent Orchestration, Claude Code Skills, AI-Assisted DevOps, LLM-Driven Incident Response

Testing: JUnit, TestNG, Mockito, Selenium, Test Automation Frameworks

Education

Master of Software Engineering — University of South Carolina, Columbia, SC

August 2016 — December 2017