Senior Backend EngineerBuilding at Razorpay

builds the systems that move money.

Senior backend engineer at Razorpay. I take ambiguous, cross-cutting problems from spec to production, raise the bar for the engineers around me, and ship products on weekends that people actually pay for.

$ whoamiCurrently: backend engineer, product builder, systems thinker, go & java, llm agent builder
Bangalore, India--:--:-- IST
01 — AboutWho is this guy

Based in
Bangalore
Experience
4+ years, fintech & telecom
Led
Teams of 3 to 7
Open to
Senior & lead roles
Lokesh B M smiling, standing in a light blue shirt
Lokesh B MBangalore, India
$0K

per month in revenue leakage prevented at Rakuten

$0K

quarterly GMV from a feature I owned end to end

-0%

mean time to resolve, after unified observability

0+

Newsio downloads in week one, 4.8-star rating

02 — Work2020 — Now

  • Payments infrastructure, internal AI tooling, and features owned from PRD to production.

    • Led the Bulk Merchant Migration feature end to end: backend architecture, frontend, UX, and the product spec. Nearly $200K in quarterly GMV.
    • Designed and built 4+ LLM-powered agents for debugging, on-call assistance, and automated root-cause analysis.
    • Implemented database routing with reader/writer traffic separation, cutting load on primary databases.
    • Led production deployments and infra migrations, including analytics modernization, with minimal downtime.
    • Resolved transaction reconciliation mismatches and incidents under strict SLAs in a high-scale fintech system.
    GoMySQLKafkaRedisLLM agentsReact

  • Led a telecom revenue-assurance platform across a 12-service Go and Java ecosystem.

    • Led development of a revenue assurance platform preventing ~$400K/month in leakage by catching billing inconsistencies.
    • Designed and scaled distributed microservices in Go and Java Spring Boot with gRPC, handling high-volume telecom transactions.
    • Integrated Prometheus, OpenTelemetry, and structured logging across the ecosystem: MTTD down 40%, MTTR down 50%.
    • Led a team of 3 backend engineers and owned architecture decisions for new services.
    GoJava Spring BootgRPCKafkaElasticsearchOpenTelemetry

  • Backend systems for enterprise web platforms in Java.

    • Built backend systems and features for enterprise web platforms, improving performance by 20%.
    • Reduced API response times by 15% through targeted optimization.
    • Worked closely with product managers and frontend teams in agile delivery.
    JavaSpring BootRESTSQL

  • Co-founded an AI short-news app during the pandemic and led a team of 7.

    • Shipped a cross-platform mobile app in 3 months: 750+ downloads and a 4.8-star rating in the first week.
    • Led product strategy, engineering decisions, and rapid iteration on retention and engagement.
    AndroidPythonNLPFirebase
03 — WeekendsBuilt between Saturday and Sunday

No meetings, no tickets, no roadmap. Just a problem I ran into during the week, a blank repo on Saturday morning, and something real people can use by Sunday night.

C
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A
AI Brief
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Live

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U
Unsent
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Letters you will never send

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A typical weekend

Same loop, every week.

  1. Sat 07:00

    Coffee, then a blank repo. Pick the one annoying problem from the week worth fixing for everyone.

  2. Sat 10:00

    Ship the ugliest version that works. Deploy to a real domain before lunch so there is no backing out.

  3. Sat 16:00

    A LeetCode problem or two to keep the fundamentals sharp. 250+ and counting.

  4. Sun 09:00

    Read what the AI labs released this week and write it up for AI Brief.

  5. Sun 14:00

    Polish, SEO, and the boring parts users actually feel. Then switch one of my six languages on and go outside.

04 — How I work

Principles I actually use.

Ship useful work, understand the system around it, and leave enough signal for the next person to run it safely.

01

Tradeoffs over perfection

There is no perfect solution, only the right one for the constraints in front of you. Write down the why so the next person inherits context, not just code.

02

Own it like you get paged

Treat every system as if you will be woken up for it at 3 AM. That changes how you handle observability, errors, runbooks, and documentation.

03

Ship fast, responsibly

Sustainable velocity beats bursts followed by firefighting. Feature flags, gradual rollouts, real tests, automated rollbacks.

04

Design the system, not the service

Components are easy. The complexity lives in the interactions, bottlenecks, and failure cascades between them.

05 — ToolkitWhat I reach for