About

Vishnu Balachandran

Technical Consultant · Engineering Leader · Technical Architect · Staff Engineer

I build resilient systems and lead teams that ship.

I'm Vishnu Balachandran, a technical consultant and Java technical expert with 8+ years architecting resilient banking and fintech platforms. I currently lead event-driven pricing and billing systems at Zafin — Java, Kotlin, Spring Boot, microservices, and Kafka are the stack I build and run production infrastructure on.

My work spans technical architecture, system design, and engineering leadership: high-throughput systems processing millions of transactions daily, platform security hardening, and mentoring engineering teams of 10 to 30+ into stronger architects. I take on Technical Lead, Staff Engineer, and consulting engagements where the problem is genuinely hard.

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Skills

Distributed Systems & Architecture

Expert

Architected the event-driven pricing and billing platform powering production billing for banking clients at Zafin — the domain model, event flows, and service boundaries the team builds on daily.

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

Languages & Frameworks

Expert

Built and hardened services processing millions of transactions and requests daily, improving reliability, cutting latency, and speeding up deployments across the stack.

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

Domain: Banking & Fintech

Expert

8+ years deep in banking and fintech platforms — pricing, billing, and deal management systems that real institutions run production revenue through.

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

Leadership & Mentorship

Expert

Led and mentored engineering teams of 10 to 30+, raising delivery standards and growing engineers into architecture-level thinkers.

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

Cloud & Platform

Advanced

Ran production deployments and CI/CD pipelines on Azure and AWS for banking-grade platforms, closing security gaps without disrupting live traffic.

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

Data & Messaging

Advanced

Designed the data and messaging backbone for event-driven systems handling banking-scale transaction volume, from Kafka topics to the databases behind them.

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

API & Integration

Advanced

Designed the API layers internal and client teams build against, plus the observability stack that keeps them accountable in production.

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

Workflow & Frontend

Proficient

Used Temporal for durable workflow orchestration and built the React/TypeScript interfaces product teams actually touch.

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

Still learning, still building

I pick up something new most weeks — a pattern, a tool, a way to ship faster without breaking things — and bring it back into how I build and teach. If you'd like to work together, I offer courses and paid 1:1 consultancy.

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