Akashraj Kalathingal

- Core engineer on BMO InvestorLine's AI-powered financial advisory chatbot — designing Java/Spring Boot microservices that expose internal banking APIs as MCP (Model Context Protocol) tools consumed by an LLM agent for real-time portfolio insights and personalized advice. - Built data ingestion pipelines using Kedro and Azure Document Intelligence to transform unstructured financial documents (prospectuses, statements, regulatory filings) into vector embeddings powering the chatbot's RAG retrieval layer. - Led migration of secrets management from Red Hat OpenShift to HashiCorp Vault across 10+ production services — replacing in-cluster secret stores with Vault-issued dynamic credentials and strengthening compliance posture for regulated banking workloads. - Drove on-prem to AWS migration of critical production services, re-platforming workloads onto containerized AWS infrastructure with multi-AZ resilience and IaC-driven deployments. - Designed and implemented authorization patterns for LLM tool-use on regulated user data, including per-request user-bound token exchange, scoped credentials, and audit logging for every tool invocation. - Built modular, accessible Angular components for AdviceDirect onboarding flows — multi-account enrollment, KYC, and risk-profile capture — improving conversion across self-directed and assisted-investing journeys. - Delivered RESTful APIs integrating with internal banking systems for account data, market data, transactions, and customer profiles, maintaining strict enterprise SLAs on availability and latency. - Operated microservices on Red Hat OpenShift with horizontal autoscaling and zero-downtime rollouts; partnered with SRE on capacity planning and incident response. - Collaborated with product owners, UX designers, QA, and platform teams in an Agile environment to ship customer-facing AI features aligned with BMO's digital modernization roadmap.

- Engineered features on Scotiabank's next-generation high-value payments platform — processing billions of dollars in daily SWIFT and wire transactions for Canadian and cross-border banking customers. - Led ISO 20022 migration for outgoing MX-format wire payments — automating fraud validation, FX conversion, and charges posting to align Scotiabank with global SWIFT 2025 standards ahead of the November 2025 end-of-coexistence deadline. - Owned end-to-end SSL/TLS certificate remediation across multiple production payment applications — establishing lifecycle tracking, preventing service disruption, and closing audit findings on enterprise security controls. - Acted as both IBM Financial Transaction Manager (FTM) developer and Java full-stack engineer on core payments systems supporting high-value transaction flows. - Designed planning matrices and impact analyses for ISO 20022 enablement across the payments stack — partnering with risk, fraud, and SWIFT operations teams to coordinate cross-functional rollout. - Architected fraud-validation integration with the bank's central payment hub, defining contracts between FTM, fraud engines, and clearing systems for low-latency decisions on time-sensitive wire payments. - Evaluated interrelationships across payment hubs, fraud engines, SWIFT gateways, FX engines, and clearing systems . - Provided front-line production support on a rotating on-call schedule — triaging and resolving incidents on systems with strict business-hour SLAs and zero tolerance for transaction loss. - Authored comprehensive technical and functional design documents, runbooks, and knowledge bases — directly reducing ramp time for new team members and serving as canonical references during audits. - Evaluated new vendor systems, ran proof-of-concept demos with engineering leadership, and contributed to cost-benefit analyses on platform investment decisions.

Worked during the Black Friday and Boxing Day Sales season helping multiple teams and department working as a cross functional team member.

- Designed and scaled core microservices for Target's enterprise data orchestration and scheduling platform — moving petabyte-scale data across heterogeneous systems and powering retail-wide analytics workflows. - Architected the platform's Patroller subsystem for self-healing job recovery — built detection, retry, and escalation logic that materially improved job success rates and reduced operator pages across peak retail seasons (Black Friday / Cyber Monday). - Built the platform's reporting and analytics layer on Apache Druid + Grafana — modeled datasources for sub-second slice-and-dice across throughput, latency, and error metrics, giving leadership real-time visibility into platform health and capacity utilization. - Drove platform-wide Log4Shell (CVE-2021-44228) remediation — coordinated dependency upgrades, regression testing, and emergency releases across services under tight executive timelines. - Modernized the platform's admin and operator UI in React (Hooks, Context API, Material UI) — delivered reusable component libraries for job scheduling, monitoring, and configuration adopted by hundreds of internal engineers. - Authored production APIs across multiple codebases and tuned Druid ingestion adapter parameters to optimize ingestion throughput and query latency. - Stood up CI/CD pipelines using Drone, Jenkins, Docker, and Kubernetes — standardized deployments and improved release velocity for the team. - Led peak readiness planning, capacity testing, and load testing strategy that ensured platform stability during Target's highest-traffic retail events of the year. - Resolved multiple critical production incidents — complex Hive workflow failures, Kibana logging pipeline outages, and scheduler node anomalies. - Delivered features across both cloud and on-premise environments, ensuring consistent performance and interoperability within Target's hybrid deployment model.

- As part of Automation Portal ETL platform developed various new backend adapters, designed and developed new features for back-end from scratch and improved or made changes to existing architecture for providing a better experience for the users. - API Development: Written multiple APIs for the platform across different codebases, facilitating seamless communication and integration. - Mentoring and Onboarding: Trained junior engineers in domain knowledge and technically mentored them through code reviews. - Pipeline Setup: Involved in setting up deployment pipelines and CICD pipelines, streamlining the development and release processes. - Peak Critical Strategy Planning: Contributed to peak critical strategy planning and testing, ensuring the platform's reliability during peak loads. - Adapters Enhancement: Worked on Druid parameter enhancement for various adapters, improving their efficiency and adaptability. - New UI/UX development: Worked on designing and developing multiple components as part of the application's user interface upgrade in React. - Dashboard Setup: Set up the Kibana dashboard for API debugging and Grafana dashboard for monitoring application health, integrating Shuttle IO alerts for proactive monitoring of application health. - Extensive experience in utilizing visualization tools to extract meaningful insights from data, enhancing data-driven decision-making processes. - Collaborated with cross-functional teams to gather requirements, design solutions, and implement data-related projects, fostering a collaborative and results-driven work environment. - Proficiently configured and deployed applications, leveraging in-house cloud platforms. Conducted thorough debugging, ensuring optimal performance. Documented and transferred knowledge on cloud configurations, deployment procedures, and debugging processes

- Built an enterprise ERP web application and an event-hosting platform end-to-end — owning backend services (Java/Spring), relational data modeling, REST API design, and frontend delivery. - Investigated and resolved high-severity production defects under strict client SLAs — producing reproducible repro steps, root-cause analyses, and durable fixes. - Delivered code packages complete with comprehensive technical documentation outlining reproducible build, deploy, and issue-resolution steps for downstream teams. - Authored production-grade runbooks and technical documentation adopted as onboarding material for new engineers joining the team. - Collaborated with cross-functional teams in a global delivery model — coordinating across time zones with client stakeholders, BAs, and QA. - Contributed to estimation, planning, and code review practices, building habits that scaled with me into more senior roles. Tech: Java · Spring · JavaScript · HTML5 · CSS3 · SQL · REST APIs

Online program, Computer science - in collaboration with Great Lakes and Texas McCombs -Python -ML -Deep Learning -Neural Networks -Computer vision -NLP