Hari Krishna Prakash

Senior Applications Engineer & Backend Architect
Backend Architect with 10+ years of experience designing distributed systems, high-throughput ingestion pipelines, and resilient multi-cloud services. Specialized in Event-Driven Architecture (EDA), Change Data Capture (CDC), and engineering high-impact internal productivity tools and AI/MCP integrations.

Skills

Agile / Scrum
Functional Programming
Java [GraalVM]
Kotlin
Spring Boot / Security / Batch
JOOQ
Microservices
Kafka
Debezium (CDC)
Azure (AKS, Front Door, Event Hubs, ACR)
Kubernetes / OpenShift
Terraform
Argo CD / Workflows
PostgreSQL / MySQL / Redis
Prometheus / Grafana
OpenTelemetry / APM
ELK Stack
Maven / Gradle
TestContainers / Gatling
Swagger / OpenAPI
MCP Servers

Work Experience

Senior Applications Engineer
Rakuten Group
Feb 2024 – Present Tokyo, Japan
Multinational conglomerate offering e-commerce, fintech, and digital content services.
Achievements/Tasks
  • Architected the Swing Analysis platform for the Rakuten GORA app; implemented an Event-Driven Architecture (EDA) using Debezium CDC to capture database changes for real-time ML orchestration.
  • Engineered a Watchdog Resiliency Service to mitigate silent failures in the Azure Malware Scanning pipeline; implemented a background "Sweeper" to auto-recover transactions stuck in scanning states, ensuring 100% processing completion.
  • Engineered multi-cloud resiliency with Azure Front Door, load-balancing across AKS and Rakuten One Cloud routing paths.
  • Integrated a C-based FFmpeg/JPEG media processing pipeline wrapped in Java, sustaining 10k+ videos with ~99% success and reducing processing time by ~30%.
  • Managed automated releases via Argo Workflows, Helm charts, and Argo CD, maintaining 100% deployment reliability.
  • Applied Functional Programming paradigms in Kotlin, utilizing immutable state and pure functions to ensure thread-safe, predictable behavior in concurrent services.
Senior Software Engineer
Standard Chartered Bank (via Luxoft)
Mar 2023 – Feb 2024 Bengaluru, India
Digital transformation company delivering innovative solutions to global banking clients.
Achievements/Tasks
  • Migrated legacy credit risk platform services to cloud-native architecture using Docker and Red Hat OpenShift.
  • Centralized logging and monitoring utilizing the ELK stack and Prometheus/Grafana to accelerate cross-team debugging.
  • Implemented high-throughput edge routing and API security using Spring Cloud Gateway.
Software Development Engineer 3 (Previously SSE via Altimetrik)
PayPal
May 2019 – Mar 2023 Chennai, India
Global technology platform for digital payments and credit lifecycle management.
Achievements/Tasks
  • Resolved critical token-invalidation race conditions by engineering a Distributed State Management solution with a "Request-in-Flight" locking pattern.
  • Led backend implementation for AU/CITI Co-Branded Card services; designed partner-facing external services and complex eligibility rulesets in the credit domain.
  • Built high-resiliency daemon services for processing Credit Lifecycle events across Checkout and Payments domains.
  • Recognized twice with the GEM Award for exceptional delivery, cross-domain technical coordination, and execution quality.
Java Developer
IVTL Infoview Technologies Pvt Ltd
Jul 2016 – May 2019 Chennai, India
  • Developed internal tools for coding standards validation and engineering productivity frameworks.
  • Built core storage-drive functionality for the internal CORTEX framework.

Technical Innovation & AI

Engineering Productivity & AI Tooling
  • AI/MCP Orchestration: Engineered Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers for secure LLM interfacing with Confluence, Jira, and Kibana.
  • Platform Automation: Built custom automation skills for Kubernetes and internal observability stacks (Prometheus/Grafana).
  • Knowledge Engineering: Integrated context-capture pipelines (Obsidian/Second Brain) for AI agent context preservation.

Education

Bachelor of Computer Science and Engineering
Adhiyamaan College of Engineering
Jun 2012 – May 2016 Hosur, India