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Director of Software Engineering — Payments Platforms & Distributed Systems
Pune, Maharashtra, India · deveshgote@outlook.com · linkedin.com/in/devessh

Profile

Engineering leader with 19+ years building payments infrastructure, from card-issuing and merchant underwriting through corporate settlement platforms processing millions of transactions a day. Currently Director, Cloud Engineering at Verifone, owning a 10-person team and 30+ microservices. Track record of taking systems from monolith to event-driven microservices without disrupting live customers, cutting settlement time by 90%, and building correctness guarantees — idempotency, exactly-once processing — into the platform by default rather than by discipline.

Core Skills

Experience

• Lead a 10-person engineering team owning 30+ microservices across the payments platform.
• Reduced settlement processing time by 90%, from 8 hours to 45 minutes, by re-architecting the settlement engine for parallel processing.
• Ended a recurring source of delayed merchant payouts: the settlement engine's acquirer file — a strict 80-byte fixed-record format — used to get rejected outright by the acquirer when it contained duplicate transactions. Built a lightweight duplicate check that runs before each record is written to the file, with the uniqueness key configurable per settlement service — each service defines its own combination of fields, independent of whether the client passes an idempotency key. Started in-memory, then extended to a self-cleaning file-based store; now runs underneath multi-million-transaction settlement services with zero acquirer rejections since.
• Designed and deployed an enterprise-grade idempotency key framework guaranteeing exactly-once transaction processing across EMEA and US payment ecosystems.
• Introduced Built-In Quality practices, shifting testing from unit-test-heavy to container-backed integration tests using Testcontainers across 30+ services.
• Regularly present architecture decisions and technical strategy to leadership, driving internal RFCs for major platform changes.

• Led a ~15-person organization spanning backend, SRE, web, mobile, and QA for a corporate card platform serving hundreds of banks across the EU and US.
• Drove a shift to lean performance-testing culture: replaced ad hoc, client-triggered performance runs with a weekly cadence — pull the latest build of every service, deploy to a QA cluster scaled to match production (replicas and resources included), and run the load tests. The first few weeks needed hands-on firefighting most Fridays; a few weeks in, it ran on its own, with the latest report shared with clients every time.
• Owned a platform handling millions of transactions per day; tuned Elasticsearch indexing and refresh semantics under sustained load.
• Automated multi-tenant file ingest, turning onboarding into configuration rather than a bespoke engineering project.

• Joined in March 2020 with no prior Scala or Akka experience — taught myself the stack, then wrote the ramp-up plan the rest of the team used to learn it. Led the migration from a monolith to event-driven microservices while keeping live customers on the platform throughout, live in production by January 2021.
• One of the leanest teams of the five roles: full ownership from dev to production, including owning incidents end-to-end — triage, resolution, post-incident fixes; backed by integration tests running on Testcontainers, with a build breaker enforcing 80% coverage as a quality gate.
• Implemented an Akka cluster singleton in the Processor Gateway to dedupe transactions fetched from the processor APIs before publishing to Pulsar and indexing to Elasticsearch — exactly-once processing under pod restarts and churn. Carried the same pattern forward into Fiserv.
• Built a plugin-based issuer layer using CQRS and DDD to model corporate account hierarchies.

• Built Enterprise Tools' configurable eApplication framework, letting acquirers define their own merchant-onboarding workflows.
• Delivered Transending's underwriting module (credit, OFAC, match-report checks) and Harmony, the inter-product bridge for transaction-lifecycle visibility.
• Integrated with TSYS Card Guard, configuring fraud rules and card controls for the authorization engine underneath card transaction decisions.
• Grew from individual contributor to leading a 10-person team across backend engineering and automation QA.
• Designed the team's technical hiring framework, integrating HackerRank assessments to standardize evaluation across every open role.

• Built a customer-registration system for a Japanese consumer-finance company, integrating third-party credit-bureau lookups.
• Delivered a warranty-claim review system for Nissan Motors Japan, validating dealer claims against automated filters.
• Built candidate and recruiter workflows for a jobs portal serving the molding industry.

Education

Bachelor of Engineering, Information Technology
KaviKulguru Institute of Technology & Science, Nagpur University — 2001 to 2005

Certifications

Sun Certified Java Programmer, Platform 1.4