Rohan Kulkarni
Summary
Engineering leader with 11+ years building large-scale data and backend platforms in fintech and consumer internet. Experienced in org design, hiring, technical strategy, and hands-on system design. PhD in Computer Science with publications in distributed storage and stream processing.
Overview
12
12
years of professional experience
2
2
Certifications
1
1
Language
Work History
Director of Engineering - Data Platforms
AuroraPay (FinTech)
01.2022 - Current
- Owned architecture and roadmap for data platform serving 40+ internal teams; scaled daily processing from 0.8 TB to 6.5 TB with cost controls.
- Built governance model (data contracts, lineage, SLAs) improving trust; increased dataset adoption by 55% in 12 months.
- Led incident response and postmortems for P0/P1 data outages; introduced runbooks and SLOs reducing repeat incidents by 60.
- Mentored 12 engineers across 3 levels; designed promotion rubrics and led hiring loops (70+ interviews).
- Partnered with legal and security teams to implement privacy controls (PII classification, retention policies) across pipelines.
Engineering Manager - Platform
ShopWave (Consumer Internet)
06.2018 - 12.2021
- Managed a team of 10 building a multi-tenant API platform; improved p95 latency from 420 ms to 160 ms.
- Designed multi-region failover strategy and chaos drills; achieved 99.95% availability for critical services.
- Delivered developer portal and self-serve provisioning; reduced new-service setup time from days to hours.
- Implemented CI/CD with automated tests and canary releases; lowered change failure rate.
- Partnered with product and analytics to define event schema and tracking standards.
Senior Software Engineer
DataNimbus Labs
07.2014 - 05.2018
- Built a distributed key-value store prototype with consensus; evaluated performance under failure scenarios.
- Implemented stream ingestion service with backpressure handling and monitoring dashboards.
- Optimized JVM services and reduced GC pauses; documented best practices for team-wide adoption.
- Contributed to open-source libraries; authored internal tech talks on distributed systems.
Education
PhD - Computer Science
IIT Hyderabad
12-2014
B.Tech - Computer Engineering
COEP Technological University
12-2010
Skills
Java, Go, Python, Kafka, Flink, Spark, Airflow, Kubernetes, AWS, S3, EMR, EKS, RDS, Distributed systems, Event-driven design, Stream processing, Data lakes, Microservices, CI/CD, Org design
Certification
AWS Certified Solutions Architect - Associate
AWS
AWARDS
AuroraPay Leadership Award
01/01/2023, ShopWave 'Customer First' Award
01/01/2020
PUBLICATIONS
- Adaptive Consistency for Geo-Distributed Stores Proc. IEEE ICDCS, 01/01/2013
- Stream Processing with SLA-Aware Backpressure ACM DEBS Workshop, 01/01/2012
Timeline
Director of Engineering - Data Platforms
AuroraPay (FinTech)
01.2022 - Current
Engineering Manager - Platform
ShopWave (Consumer Internet)
06.2018 - 12.2021
Senior Software Engineer
DataNimbus Labs
07.2014 - 05.2018
B.Tech - Computer Engineering
COEP Technological University
PhD - Computer Science
IIT Hyderabad