Siddharth Kulkarni

Summary

Principal Engineer and Senior Engineer with over 18 years of experience, I specialize in the development and management of large-scale distributed systems across enterprise, e-commerce, and retail banking sectors.

Leadership : Held technology leadership positions for 12 years and transitioned into executive technology roles over the last 4 years. Currently leading as the Head of Technology for ThoughtWorks India's Retail Domain.

Agile & XP Advocacy : Champion of Extreme Programming (XP) practices, with deep expertise in Test-Driven Development (TDD), project planning, and evolutionary architecture.

System Architecture : Architected robust platforms and microservices on Kubernetes and Docker, both self-hosted and via cloud services like EKS and GKE. Designed resilient, event-driven, and stateful distributed systems using Kafka, GCP Pub/Sub etc.

GenAI : Proficient in using and evangelizing AI tools like GitHub Copilot, Cursor and Codium to enhance coding efficiency. Experience with the integration of offline LLMs particularly the Gemma family, for secure handling of sensitive data.

Mentoring & Adoption of Technology : Actively mentoring and leading individuals & teams to adopt best engineering practices and foster career growth.

Tech Sales & Client Engagement : Engaged in advisory, technology sales, leading proposals and solutions for clients in commerce, banking, and technology sectors, enhancing client relationships and project scopes, directly impacting revenues.

Overview

years of professional experience

Work History

Technology Principal Consultant & Architect

ThoughtWorks Technologies

01.2016 - Current

Currently working as a Technology Principal Consultant & Architect with a B2B Commerce giant to rebuild the commerce platform from scratch using Open source tech and stack
Tech stack includes Typescript, Express, Redis, Postgres, AWS EKS etc.

Consultant

Cognizant

01.2006 - 01.2016

Predominantly worked as a consultant for an American Investment Banking firm
Accumulated two years of onsite experience in both New York and Houston between 2010 and 2012
Tech Stack included Java, Struts, Oracle, and jBPM etc.

Education

Bachelor of Engineering - Technology and Engineering

MS University of Baroda

01.2006

Skills

Java / Spring Boot / Micronaut
JavaScript / Typescript with ExpressJS/Fastify JS
Postgres, MongoDB, Redis
Technology Implementation
Digital Transformation

Team/Account Leadership
Proposal Development
Data Engineering
GCP and AWS knowledge
Kubernetes, Docker (GKE, EKS)

Accomplishments

Omnichannel POS Platform : Lead the design and rollout (across 200+ stores) of an omnichannel ecommerce and point of sale (POS) platform for a major retailer, leading a team of 48. Focused on creating a highly reliable, scalable, and observable distributed systems for a geographically distributed operation. This initiative not only won the Forester Technology Excellence Award but also boosted sales by 9% and improved the Net Promoter Score (NPS) by 50%.
B2B Commerce Platform Transformation : Drove the migration and custom development of a large-scale B2B commerce platform, moving from a SaaS model to a custom solution built on the Medusa open-source framework. Managed a team of 30, ensuring a zero downtime transition while enhancing platform capabilities.
Technology & Process Solution Proposals : Engaged in crafting and presenting multiple technology and process solutions proposals to clients across various sectors, enhancing ThoughtWorks' engagement and business development efforts.
Educational Workshops & Seminars : Conducted numerous workshops on topics such as Platform Thinking, Evolutionary Architecture, use of LLMs in software development, and database optimization. These sessions were conducted both internally at ThoughtWorks and with external clients/attendees to improve knowledge sharing and innovation.

Timeline