Vishnu Balachandran

About

Vishnu Balachandran

Technical Lead · Technical Architect · Staff Engineer · Engineering Manager (Track)

I'm Vishnu Balachandran, a technology leader based in Kollam, Kerala, with more than eight years of experience building and scaling software for banking, fintech, travel, and commerce. I currently serve as Lead Product Engineer I at Zafin, where I architect event-driven pricing and billing platforms, guide engineering teams, and lead production delivery for banking clients.

My work sits at the intersection of architecture, delivery, and hands-on engineering. I have designed high-throughput systems processing millions of transactions and requests daily, improved reliability and deployment speed, reduced latency, and strengthened platform security. I also lead technical upgrades and mentoring, with experience guiding teams of 10 to 30 or more engineers.

I bring deep expertise in Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot, microservices, Kafka, cloud platforms, and AI-assisted engineering. My strongest domain is banking and fintech, especially pricing, billing, and deal management.

I'm focused on Technical Lead, Technical Architect, Staff Engineer, and Engineering Manager opportunities where I can shape resilient systems, raise engineering standards, and turn complex business problems into reliable products.

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Skills

Distributed Systems & Architecture

Expert
  • Microservices architecture
  • Event-driven architecture (Kafka/Redpanda)
  • DDD / CQRS / Clean Architecture
  • System design
  • Design patterns (GoF)
  • REST API design
  • API Gateway

Languages & Frameworks

Expert
  • Java 21
  • Kotlin
  • Spring Boot
  • Spring Cloud
  • Spring Batch
  • Spring Data JPA
  • Hibernate
  • Resilience4j
  • Netflix OSS

Domain: Banking & Fintech

Expert
  • Pricing engines
  • Billing & invoicing
  • Deal & arrangement management
  • Profitability analysis
  • AUM calculations
  • Portfolio & custody operations

Leadership & Mentorship

Expert
  • Technical leadership
  • Engineer mentorship
  • Stakeholder & executive communication
  • Agile / Scrum
  • Cross-functional team leadership (10-30+ engineers)

Cloud & Platform

Advanced
  • Azure (AKS
  • DevOps
  • FlexiDB
  • CrunchyDB)
  • AWS (EC2
  • EKS
  • S3)
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • ArgoCD
  • GitHub Actions
  • Jenkins
  • CI/CD & GitOps

Data & Messaging

Advanced
  • Kafka
  • Redis
  • Elasticsearch
  • MongoDB
  • PostgreSQL
  • Oracle
  • MySQL
  • Azure CosmosDB
  • Apache NiFi
  • Ignite Cache

API & Integration

Advanced
  • GraphQL API layer design
  • AI-assisted / agentic engineering
  • Observability (Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • ELK)

Workflow & Frontend

Proficient
  • Temporal.io workflow orchestration
  • React
  • TypeScript

Experience

Mar 2025 – Present

Lead Product Engineer I

Zafin · Trivandrum, India

  • Architected the Corporate Pricing Engine (CPE), an event-driven pricing/billing platform (Spring Boot, Kafka, PostgreSQL, DDD) processing 2M+ transactions/day at sub-second latency
  • Led delivery mentoring 10+ engineers; drove SOLID/CQRS adoption, cutting defect leakage 40%
  • Built delta-processing ETL (Spring Batch, Kafka partitioning) cutting data-load time 60%
  • Led the first production go-live of Deal Manager for ING Bank as technical SPOC, with 99.9% uptime on day one
  • Led a Spring Boot upgrade across 20+ microservices, eliminating 15+ CVEs
  • Built an AI-powered Pricing & Billing Copilot chatbot that cut L1 resolution time 50%
Aug 2022 – Dec 2024

Technical Lead

Way.com · Remote

  • Built a Netflix-scale API gateway handling 5M+ daily requests (Resilience4j, Redis, Spring Cloud Gateway) at 99.95% availability
  • Shipped 30+ features across Parking, Carwash, Way+, Roadside Assistance & CRM with partners including Amazon, getUpside, FuelRewards, Travelers, and Cure, driving $1M+ incremental ARR
  • Built real-time analytics with Kafka Streams, Elasticsearch, and Kibana
  • Partnered directly with the CEO and cross-functional stakeholders on technical strategy, cutting average feature time-to-market from 6 weeks to 3 weeks
May 2021 – Jul 2022

Application Developer

Udaan.com · Bengaluru, India

  • Built a custom API gateway on Azure with Resilience4j, cutting P99 latency 35%
  • Built a canary deployment framework with A/B testing and feature flags, cutting deployment incidents 70% and doubling release velocity
  • Built monitoring dashboards (Azure Data Explorer, Prometheus, Thanos, Grafana) cutting mean-time-to-detect from 15 minutes to under 3
  • Implemented a Resilience4j resiliency framework in the core API server, improving uptime from 99.5% to 99.95%
May 2019 – May 2021

Software Engineer

SunTec Business Solutions · Trivandrum, India

  • Built an automated test framework for the Xelerate banking platform, cutting regression cycle from 5 days to 8 hours
  • Built Kafka/NiFi/Ignite Cache streaming pipelines for banking billing and payments
  • Created internal AWS deployment automation (Kubernetes, EKS), cutting manual deployment effort 80%
  • Added banking functionality (payment follow-up, bill generation) to Xelerate 2.5
Jul 2018 – May 2019

Software Engineer R&D

FlyTxt Mobile Solutions · Trivandrum, India

  • Achieved a 10x latency reduction on a core platform component via JProfiler profiling and Hibernate optimization
  • Contributed to telecom/CRM platform engineering on a large-scale data pipeline

Education

TKM College of Engineering

B.Tech, Computer Science & Engineering

2014 – 2018 · CGPA 7.7

Let's work together

Whether it's architecture review, mentoring, or a course — I'd love to help.

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