Rajeev Kushwaha | Senior Software Engineer

A few systems I'm proud of.

Payments under peak load, claims that have to reconcile to the penny, and orders that can't arrive out of sequence. Here's what I built and what actually changed because of it.

Financial services · Synchrony

Real-time transaction processing at peak load

Event-driven microservices that process millions of financial transactions every day. I built Kafka consumer backpressure handling with pause and resume strategies, so the services slow down gracefully under peak volume instead of crashing and paging someone at 2 a.m.

Batch pipeline moved to Lambda and S3: 35 min down to 6 min

spring-boot · kafka-streams · avro · aws-lambda · redis · oracle

Healthcare · DXC Technology

Claims reconciliation across millions of records

A reconciliation engine that compares Kafka streams against Oracle at scale to keep claims data accurate. I also built the Angular ops portal that lets the operations team inspect dead-letter messages and trigger retries themselves, without filing a ticket.

Query tuning with explain plans and indexing: minutes down to seconds

spring-batch · kafka · oracle-plsql · angular · aws-lambda · k8s

Retail · Target

Ordered events and self-healing failure paths

Kafka partitioning strategies that keep transactions strictly ordered across distributed services, plus a custom dead-letter queue framework that isolates failed messages and recovers them automatically. Before that, recovery meant manual triage.

Failed-message recovery: manual triage to fully automated

kafka · spring-boot · ngrx · react · dynamodb · redis

What nine years in production has taught me.

Plan for failure early

Backpressure, dead-letter queues, idempotent consumers, automated retries. In systems that move money and medical claims, I think through the failure path before the happy path, because that's the part that gets tested at the worst possible time.

Measure before optimizing

Explain plans before rewrites. Dashboards before hunches. Every performance improvement I've shipped has a number behind it, like 35 minutes down to 6, because without a baseline you can't tell an optimization from a guess.

Own the whole thing

Requirements, design, build, deploy, monitor, support. At Synchrony, DXC, and Target I carried my services from the first design discussion to the on-call rotation, working directly with architects, product owners, QA, and operations.

Where I've worked.

Synchrony Financial

Senior Software Engineer

SEP 2023 · PRESENT

Charlotte, NC

Real-time financial transaction processing platform

Own end-to-end delivery of high-volume transaction services, from requirements through design, build, deployment, and production support.
Designed event-driven microservices with Spring Boot and Kafka that process millions of financial transactions in real time.
Built consumer backpressure handling with pause and resume strategies that prevented failures during peak transaction loads.
Migrated legacy batch systems to AWS Lambda and S3, cutting processing time from 35 minutes to 6.
Built secure messaging with encryption, masking, and audit logging, and removed hardcoded credentials with Secrets Manager.
Set up observability with Prometheus, Grafana, ELK, and Splunk, and automated CI/CD on Jenkins, Docker, ECS, and Kubernetes.

DXC Technology

Senior Software Engineer

NOV 2021 · AUG 2023

Plano, TX

Healthcare claims processing and data reconciliation platform

Led claims processing services from design through production, working across business, QA, DBA, and cloud teams.
Built reconciliation tools that compare millions of records between Kafka streams and Oracle to keep claims data accurate.
Developed Angular support portals for dead-letter queue inspection and automated message retries.
Cut query execution from minutes to seconds through explain-plan analysis, indexing, and PL/SQL tuning.
Implemented AWS Lambda validation and extraction workflows, with containerized deployments on Kubernetes and Docker.

Target Corporation

Software Engineer

DEC 2018 · OCT 2021

Minneapolis, MN

Retail transaction and order management platform

Owned retail order and transaction services end to end, from analysis and design through deployment and production support.
Designed Kafka event architectures with strict partitioning to preserve transaction ordering and consistency.
Built a custom dead-letter queue framework that isolates and recovers failed messages automatically.
Delivered Angular and NgRx enterprise frontends plus React dashboards for real-time transaction analytics.
Shipped serverless AWS Lambda workflows for automated financial processing and notifications.

Morningstar

Software Engineer

MAY 2017 · NOV 2018

Chicago, IL

Real-time market data processing platform

Built real-time ingestion services for high-frequency market data feeds.
Implemented multithreaded processing models to raise throughput and cut latency.
Designed recovery mechanisms validated with JUnit and Mockito fault-injection testing.
Managed AWS infrastructure including API Gateway, S3, IAM, CloudWatch, SNS, SQS, and SES, with archival on S3 Glacier and EFS.

I build the systems that
move millions of
transactions a day.