Backend Engineer · Fintech & AI

Backend engineer for financial systems that stay correct when the pressure arrives.

I’m Zaid Ali—a backend engineer with 4+ years of experience turning complex accounting and payment workflows into durable, production-ready products.

Explore my impact ↓View résumé ↗

Find me onlineLinkedIn ↗GitHub ↗Medium ↗

Zaid AliBackend Engineer

Production proof, not buzzwords

4⁺years building
production systems

₹95L⁺monthly GTV handled

Ledproduction revamp & service rewrite

Open to senior engineering conversations

Distributed systems◆Fintech◆AI accounting◆Product ownership◆Production reliability

01 / Selected impact

From feature delivery to
engineering ownership.

I work across the full lifecycle: shape the system, ship the workflow, observe it under load, and strengthen what production exposes.

Engineering-led product revamp

Raised the product’s operating standard—not just its feature count.

Took ownership of a complete product revamp at the engineering level, evolving the architecture and delivery practices behind a growing AI accounting platform. The work centered on durability, availability, safe change, and a codebase teams could extend with confidence.

Architecture standardsRelease confidenceOperational readinessLong-term maintainability

Durability

Availability

ScalabilityObservabilitySecurityPerformanceOperational excellence

OWN
THE
OUTCOME

Flagship releases

Product thinking × production engineering

01Collaboration

Multi-user workflows

Shipped collaborative accounting flows with clear access boundaries, ownership, and safe concurrent usage across customer teams.

02Accounting core

Journal Voucher flow

Delivered a core accounting workflow that turned complex posting rules into a dependable, reviewable product experience.

03Revenue systems

Billing module

Built the foundation for billing operations with correctness, maintainability, and the realities of financial workflows in mind.

04Identity

SSO + OAuth

Implemented secure, low-friction authentication and identity flows designed for an enterprise-ready product surface.

Impact at scale

Measured in outcomes,
not activity.

70%less manual effort

Automated multi-format bank-statement ingestion.

98%parsing accuracy

Improved confidence in AI accounting onboarding.

3×user adoption

Tally connector supporting 1,000+ active users.

50 GB+data migrated

Moved production data without service interruption.

95%faster recovery

Restored critical onboarding services under pressure.

Millionstransactions daily

Backend services for high-traffic payment systems.

02 / Deep dive

Making a Django API
production-ready.

The MDS API revamp created a clear service boundary, standardized endpoint patterns, moved pagination closer to the database, and made performance a repeatable engineering practice.

26 → 10queries per measured bank-statement request

0failures across 500-concurrency load tests

High trafficsustained throughput under high concurrency

New engineering path

Validate request→Call service→Shape query→Serialize page

Clear ownershipBusiness rules and query orchestration moved from views and serializers into focused services.

Fresh and efficientRequest-local batching reduced duplicate lookups without stale global caching.

Safer rolloutFeature flags, connection guardrails, Swagger, Postman, and repeatable load tests reduced release risk.

03 / Experience

Four years of increasing
scope and ownership.

Oct 2024 — PresentAI Accounting · Fintech

SDE II

Karbon Business

Owning critical product and platform work across AI-led accounting, financial integrations, and production reliability.

Took engineering ownership of a complete product revamp—raising the bar for durability, availability, maintainability, and release quality.
Released multi-user workflows, Journal Voucher flows, the Billing module, and SSO + OAuth capabilities across the product.
Automated PDF, Excel, and image bank-statement ingestion—cutting manual effort 70%, reaching 98% accuracy, and improving onboarding 40%.
Built real-time, bi-directional Tally sync with idempotency, retries, and reconciliation; the connector drove 3× adoption across 1,000+ users.
Migrated 50 GB+ of production data without service interruption and delivered prepaid-card flows handling ₹95L+ monthly GTV.
Improved onboarding incident recovery by 95%, raised test coverage to 80%, and reduced service failures by 50%.

Sep 2022 — May 2024Payments · Reconciliation

Backend Engineer

Juspay

Built and stabilized backend systems where correctness, throughput, and operational clarity were non-negotiable.

Owned reconciliation microservices and the surrounding system architecture.
Led codebase refactoring that improved maintainability and engineering efficiency by 40%.
Built reusable data-access APIs and ETL workflows for merchant pipelines processing millions of daily transactions.
Reduced integration latency by 30% through API architecture and cross-functional delivery improvements.
Automated delivery with Docker and Jenkins, accelerating releases 50% while keeping downtime below 1%.

Feb 2022 — Aug 2022Fintech Infrastructure

Technical Product Analyst Intern

Juspay

Started at the intersection of product, data, and backend engineering—and learned to treat operability as a product feature.

Designed a real-time logging pipeline using Kafka.
Built a Kibana-style analytics dashboard for live operational insight.
Used customer feedback to accelerate product iteration by 25%.
Improved data-collection accuracy to 95% for high-stakes fintech decisions.

04 / Skills showcase

Tools change.
Judgment compounds.

Select a discipline to see the tools, decisions, and production evidence behind it.

01 / 05Applied engineering · 7 sec read

Backend foundations that stay understandable as the product grows.

I design clear service boundaries, dependable API contracts, and implementation paths that make complex financial workflows easier to extend and operate.

PythonDjangoFastAPIRustActixREST APIsSwaggerPostman

Production proof

Applied while leading the MDS API production revamp and service rewrite.

05 / Tech blogs

I write down the lessons
that survive production.

Long-form notes on backend engineering, system design, performance work, and the decisions behind reliable products.

Read onMedium↗