Karan Pahlani - Resume

Senior Software Engineer with a Master's, specializing in scalable, customer-centric applications. I have successfully driven the architectural evolution from a Java/MongoDB monolith to a distributed system of Go microservices, strategically adopting specialized databases like PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, and Redis. This transformation unlocked significant gains in scalability, deployment frequency, and developer productivity. Experienced in A/B testing and data-driven optimization to improve user acquisition and deliver business-critical outcomes.

Technical Skills

Core Competencies: Product-Focused Engineering | Data-Driven Decisions | Applied AI

Languages & Frameworks: Go, Java, Python, JavaScript, TypeScript, React, NodeJS, Ruby on Rails, REST, gRPC

Platforms & Architecture: AWS (S3, SNS, SQS), Docker, Kubernetes, Kafka, Microservices, Distributed Systems, Terraform

DB & Tools: PostgreSQL, DynamoDB, MongoDB, Redis, Snowflake, CI/CD (BitBucket Pipelines), Grafana, PagerDuty

Professional Experience

Fetch Rewards

Senior Software Engineer

July 2024 – Present

Engineered a resilient, asynchronous receipt processing system using Java and Go microservices, AWS SQS, DynamoDB, and Redis. This architecture was critical for scaling to handle Super Bowl ad traffic, successfully managing peaks of over 80,000 RPS (a 10x increase).
Architected a data aggregation service that cut ML parsing costs by $30K per month by deduplicating emails 100x. Spearheaded the e-receipts 2.0 launch in Go, overhauling its monitoring with OpenTelemetry, Grafana, and HostedGraphite, boosting user engagement by 40% while cutting fraud by 70%.

Team Lead

Jan 2022 – July 2024

Led a full-stack team to architect a universal product catalog using Go microservices with PostgreSQL and DynamoDB, boosting offer matching accuracy by 35%. Built a Java Spring Batch ingestion pipeline and a React dashboard to manage product data, which accelerated partner data processing by 60% and reduced ingestion errors by 30%.

Software Engineer II

May 2021 – Jan 2022

Developed a self-service partner platform with a Go authentication microservice (OIDC/SAML, PostgreSQL) that cut integration time by 90%, and built a React dashboard for marketing to manage campaigns and monitor real-time offer performance, boosting engagement by 20%.

Software Engineer

July 2020 – May 2021

Drove a 15% increase in user acquisition by building the phone number onboarding flow in Go, leveraging AWS SNS to reduce SMS delivery failures. Also developed a React support dashboard that cut ticket handling time by 25%.

Edammo Inc.

June 2019 – August 2019

Software Development Intern

Built a full-stack resume scraping and scoring tool (React, NodeJS) that automated candidate sourcing, reducing initial screening time by 40%.

Education

Master of Computer Science

University of Iowa, Iowa City, IA

Bachelor of Computer Science

Rajiv Gandhi Technical University