Balaji Srinivasan
Balaji Srinivasan

Bengaluru, India

Balaji Srinivasan

Principal Architect turning commerce & monetization platforms into revenue, scale, and cost outcomes.

I architect end-to-end - event-driven systems, usage-based billing, and the AI-native infrastructure production teams run on.

15+ years building and scaling end-to-end commerce and monetization platforms across e-commerce, fintech, SaaS, and logistics - catalog, search, checkout, payments, fulfilment, rewards, and usage-based billing - aligning architecture with unit economics, pricing strategy, and customer experience.

Hands-on architect of event-driven kernels, high-throughput metering pipelines, multilingual search, and Kubernetes-based multi-tenant platforms, with a practitioner's focus on clean architecture, TDD, and AI-native tooling.

E-commerce & Supply Chain Fintech, Payments & Wallets SaaS & Usage-Based Billing Cloud & AI/Agentic Systems
LinkedIn Email
01

15+ years scaling commerce & monetization platforms across e-commerce, fintech, SaaS, and logistics

02

Architected a subscription platform generating $0.3M/year in recurring revenue (Deep Rooted Co)

03

Now Principal Architect at Caterpillar (Jan 2026 - Present) - TODO: add scope/impact once further along

01

Cut a tier-1 decisioning engine's latency 110ms -> 17ms with ~10x infrastructure cost reduction (Zomato)

02

Built an event-driven metering pipeline ingesting ~80K datapoints/sec at p99 < 40ms (Ushur)

03

Scaled a rewards engine issuing 5M+ coupons/day and a Kafka bulk-invoice pipeline processing 7K invoices in 3 minutes (Deep Rooted Co)

Experience

Caterpillar

Principal Architect
TODO: confirm domain focus Jan 2026 - Present Bengaluru, India
  • TODO: business/organizational scope and impact at Caterpillar (team size, program, business outcome)
  • TODO: technical scope and architecture focus at Caterpillar

Ushur

Sr Staff Architect
Cloud & AI/Agentic Systems Mar 2024 - Jan 2026 Bengaluru, India
  • Owned platform strategy for usage-based billing and metering, translating system usage directly into revenue through metering, attribution, and pricing models
  • Led the organization's transition to AI-native operations, evaluating and architecting a multi-cloud strategy that balanced performance, security, and cost
  • Delivered an internal AI agent-driven engineering platform that let teams query observability metrics, manage infrastructure, and triage production issues
  • Designed high-throughput metrics-ingestion pipelines (~80K datapoints/sec) powering real-time usage metering for billing and observability
  • Designed and implemented an event-driven metering framework for aggregation, attribution, and billing readiness, with p99 latency under 40ms
  • Led the platform engineering transformation from EC2-based infrastructure to a Kubernetes-based multi-tenant architecture; ran eBPF-based PoCs for RED metrics and LLM monitoring

Deep Rooted Co

Principal Engineer
E-commerce & Supply Chain Nov 2020 - Dec 2023 Bengaluru, India
  • Led the zero-to-one and one-to-hundred build of a supply-aware e-commerce platform spanning catalog, search, inventory, checkout, fulfilment, and logistics, scaling to ~6K requests/min
  • Architected and delivered a subscription platform generating $0.3M annually in revenue, improving retention and demand predictability
  • Scaled a rewards engine issuing 5M+ coupons/day, tightly integrated with checkout and retention flows
  • Built a supply-side inventory scheduling platform with ETA-driven Available-to-Promise (ATP) for perishables, and scaled search from Postgres full-text to a Lucene-based multilingual distributed system
  • Built a Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) layer enabling backend-driven UI for campaigns and storefronts without app releases, plus an internal feature-flag and experimentation system
  • Co-designed a core kernel layer with an event-driven architecture (Protobuf) to simplify service building, and designed a Kafka-based bulk invoice pipeline processing 7K invoices in 3 minutes

Dhaam Pay

Co-Founder
Fintech, Payments & Wallets Dec 2019 - Jan 2021 Bengaluru, India
  • Co-founded and led the zero-to-one build of a closed-loop wallet-based commerce and payments platform for a merchant marketplace
  • Architected a rewards-driven commerce system with merchant-specific and cross-merchant incentives, driving acquisition, retention, and transaction growth
  • Designed wallet and ledger systems ensuring financial correctness for stored value, rewards, and transaction tracking
  • Built merchant marketplace capabilities including configurable campaigns, offers, and pricing rules

Zomato Media Pvt Ltd

Engineering Lead
E-commerce & Supply Chain Feb 2019 - Dec 2019 Bengaluru, India
  • Reduced a mission-critical decisioning engine's latency from 110ms to 17ms while achieving ~10x infrastructure cost reduction, with zero disruption to delivery operations
  • Redesigned support and operational workflows, cutting call-center costs by ~40% while improving delivery-partner experience
  • Integrated multiple payment options, unlocking ~5% of the daily driver fleet and improving delivery continuity
  • Architected a centralized logistics-partner platform on serverless architecture for scalable partner onboarding and management
  • Designed resilient payment flows with circuit breakers and failover across third-party providers to survive vendor outages
  • Architected foundational services for driver operations, laying the groundwork for scalable, resilient logistics systems

CreditMantri Finserve Pvt Ltd

Principal Technical Architect
Fintech, Payments & Wallets Nov 2017 - Feb 2019 Chennai, India
  • Defined the technology vision for the platform, re-architecting it to align with business agility, regulatory compliance, and long-term scalability
  • Architected a secure API gateway strategy enabling seamless fintech integrations and new product avenues while ensuring GDPR compliance
  • Shaped team growth and hiring standards, embedding practices to scale the engineering organization sustainably
  • Spearheaded the overhaul of a monolithic backend into a resilient microservices ecosystem
  • Engineered custom DSL-based rule engines for financial institutions, deployed at a nationalized bank to automate e-mudra loan disbursal
  • Pioneered CI/CD pipelines, containerization, and Infrastructure-as-Code adoption, cutting cloud costs and speeding releases

Ford Motor Company

Sr Technical Lead
Enterprise Data Systems Dec 2010 - Oct 2017 Chennai, India
  • Automated financial reconciliation across Asia-Pacific operations, cutting manual effort from 2+ days to 5 minutes
  • Delivered large-scale systems across multiple geographies, grounding a career-long practice of TDD and clean-code craftsmanship
  • Designed data-ingestion pipelines processing 5M+ daily records into Ford's customer data lake
  • Built optimized reporting frameworks, cutting report-generation time from 20s to 5s

Selected Work

Usage-Based Billing & Metering Platform

Cloud & AI/Agentic Systems

↘ Built the platform that turns raw system usage directly into revenue - metering, attribution, and pricing, purpose-built for usage-based billing.

↘ Event-driven metering framework processing real-time usage data at p99 < 40ms, fed by ingestion pipelines handling ~80K datapoints/sec.

Event-Driven Observability Multi-Cloud Kubernetes

Supply-Aware E-commerce Platform

E-commerce & Supply Chain

↘ Took a commerce platform from zero to ~6K requests/min, unifying catalog, search, inventory, checkout, and fulfilment into one system.

↘ Scaled search from Postgres full-text to a Lucene-based multilingual distributed system, and shipped a subscription platform generating $0.3M/year.

Catalog Search Inventory Subscriptions

Order-Flow Decisioning Engine Optimization

E-commerce & Supply Chain

↘ Cut infrastructure spend ~10x on Zomato's highest-traffic order-flow service while keeping delivery operations uninterrupted.

↘ Reduced p50 latency from ~110ms to ~17ms on a mission-critical decisioning engine serving real-time driver assignment.

JVM Tuning High Scale Cost Optimization

Closed-Loop Wallet & Payments Platform

Fintech, Payments & Wallets

↘ Co-founded and led a wallet-based commerce platform from zero to one, building a merchant marketplace with integrated rewards and incentives.

↘ Designed wallet and ledger systems for financial correctness across stored value, rewards, and transaction tracking.

Wallets Ledger Fintech

Fintech Microservices & Rule-Engine Platform

Fintech, Payments & Wallets

↘ Re-architected a fintech monolith into microservices, opening new product integrations while maintaining GDPR compliance.

↘ Engineered a custom DSL-based rule engine deployed at a nationalized bank to automate e-mudra loan disbursal.

DSL Microservices API Gateway

Tech Stack

Agentic Distributed Systems Event-Driven Architecture (Kafka) Microservices Multi-Tenant SaaS Backend-for-Frontend (BFF) Java Kotlin GoLang Ruby Python Dart Spring Boot Flutter AWS GCP Kubernetes Docker Terraform GoCD Jenkins Postgres MySQL Oracle MongoDB Google BigTable Redis Kafka Clean Architecture TDD CI/CD Observability Performance Optimization GitOps

Education

Bachelor of Technology - Information Technology SSN College of Engineering, Anna University 2006 - 2010

Measured Outcomes

110ms -> 17ms Decisioning-engine p50 latency cut, with ~10x infrastructure cost reduction (Zomato)
~80K/sec Real-time usage-metering ingestion throughput, at p99 < 40ms (Ushur)
$0.3M/year Recurring revenue from a subscription platform architected end-to-end (Deep Rooted Co)
5M+/day Rewards engine scale - coupons issued daily, integrated with checkout and retention (Deep Rooted Co)
7K in 3 min Kafka-based bulk invoice pipeline throughput (Deep Rooted Co)
~40% cut Call-center costs reduced via redesigned support/ops workflows (Zomato)
5M+/day Records processed by a data-ingestion pipeline into Ford's customer data lake
2+ days -> 5 min Financial reconciliation automation across Asia-Pacific operations (Ford)