Zaheer Basha Syed
Bangalore
Summary
Accomplished Staff Software Engineer at Razorpay, specializing in high-scale distributed systems and microservices architecture. Expert in Golang and AWS, I led initiatives that reduced infrastructure costs and improved payment routing reliability. A proactive mentor, I drive quality and innovation while fostering collaboration across engineering teams.
Overview
7
7
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Staff Software Engineer
Razorpay
Bengaluru
11.2024 - Current
- Act as a technical consultant and mentor for a 30-engineer business unit, reviewing design documents, solving platform-wide issues, reviewing every production deployment for correctness, safety, and backward compatibility, and guiding architectural decisions.
- Partner with EMs and Directors to review OKRs, Opex, delivery adherence, define long-term tech strategy, including quality initiatives, rearchitecture initiatives, and cost optimization.
- Redesigned existing microservices in the Cell Architecture pattern, enabling isolated horizontal scaling for payment routing services, engineered for 5,000+ TPS, with a projected 80% infrastructure cost reduction, and improved fault isolation across clusters.
- Act as an AI champion for my business unit, mentoring the team on effective usage of the cursor, building on-call agents, rag-based agents for identifying potential incident-causing PRs, and experimenting to achieve a fully autonomous SDLC for small tasks without human involvement.
Lead Software Engineer
Razorpay
Bengaluru
11.2022 - 11.2024
- Scaled Optimizer into a 30% market-share payments routing product, improving reliability, reconciliation accuracy, and multi-gateway performance at scale.
- Led the standardization of Payment contracts, working directly with the CTO and senior ICs to conceptualize and implement the Payments Protocol - a unified cross-gateway contract and SDK now used across 70+ providers.
- Built a high-scale aggregator processing microservice using the Protocol SDK; reduced gateway integration TAT from 210 days to 10 days, enabling rapid onboarding of new payment partners.
Senior Software Engineer
Razorpay
Bengaluru
05.2021 - 11.2022
- Part of the founding team launching Razorpay Optimizer, building market-first systems, including a unified reconciliation engine and multi-gateway reporting platform.
- Co-built Razorpay’s first Integration Testing Framework (ITF) and conducted a 3-day workshop for 20+ teams, driving org-wide adoption; this framework became the foundation of Razorpay’s modern testing pipeline.
SDE2, SDE1
FICO
Bengaluru
07.2018 - 05.2021
- Worked in a team to revamp the loan origination product from a no-code tool to Java code.
- Built a platform that provisions Couchbase and Apache Ignite on the cloud for internal teams. As part of this, I created custom resources and built Kubernetes operators to manage org-specific requirements for Couchbase and Apache Ignite.
Education
Bachelor of Technology (BTech) -
Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati
Guwahati01-2018
Skills
- Golang (Go) / Java / Python
- REST / gRPC API Design
- Event-driven Architecture (Kafka, SQS, SNS)
- AWS (EC2, Lambda, DynamoDB, ECS/EKS)
- Aurora (Postgres/MySQL compatible)
- Kubernetes (EKS)
- Docker / Containerization
- Terraform / Infrastructure as Code
- Redis / Elasticache
- LangGraph (agent workflows), LLM orchestration, AI agent pipelines, RAG systems, vector databases, and MCP servers
- Spinnaker / Jenkins
- Observability (Grafana, Prometheus, ELK, OpenTelemetry)
- Microservices Architecture
- High-scale Distributed Systems Design
- Cell-based Architecture
- Resiliency, Fault Isolation & Redundancy
- Memory profiling & CPU profiling
Certification
CKA - Certified Kubernetes Administrator
Timeline
Staff Software Engineer
Razorpay
11.2024 - Current
Lead Software Engineer
Razorpay
11.2022 - 11.2024
Senior Software Engineer
Razorpay
05.2021 - 11.2022
SDE2, SDE1
FICO
07.2018 - 05.2021
Bachelor of Technology (BTech) -
Indian Institute of Technology, Guwahati