Harsh Kochar

Software Engineer

LinkedIn | GitHub

About

Highly proactive Backend Software Engineer with over 3 years of experience in a leading fintech startup, specializing in Java, Python, Go, Rust, and JavaScript. Driven by a strong interest in problem-solving, I leverage artificial intelligence for automation and process optimization, consistently delivering impactful, user-centric solutions. Proven ability to take ownership, navigate complex technical challenges, manage stakeholders effectively, and foster best practices. Thrive in dynamic startup environments, focusing on identifying product use cases and delivering high-impact solutions.

Work Experience

Software Engineer

PhonePe

Jun 2022 - Present

Contributing to a platform team at India's largest fintech startup, focusing on building scalable and resilient backend systems and driving engineering excellence.

  • Engineered a real-time batch rule evaluation system processing over 22,000 queries per second (QPS) with 99.98% uptime and a P99 latency of 100ms, effectively preventing fraudulent transactions and saving millions of rupees monthly.
  • Designed and implemented asynchronous orchestration for periodic rule evaluations using Spark, Airflow, and Kafka event streams, optimizing accuracy and performance by reducing live service load bursts by 17%.
  • Enabled critical business use cases, including trade validations, compliance checks, business validation, and Anti-Money Laundering (AML) fraud monitoring.
  • Developed a tooling platform with an automation framework for schema generation and migration, resulting in a 90% reduction in build time and a 70% increase in onboarding speed.
  • Engineered a scalable Experimentation Suite for rapid iteration of rules and ML models, incorporating real-time confusion matrix, controlled rollouts, and A/B testing, which reduced false positives by 32%, false negatives by 5%, and runtime errors by 37%.
  • Architected an AI-powered interview feedback tool utilizing Gen-AI for transcription and metric-based discussion tagging, reducing review feedback time by 80%.
  • Led a comprehensive revamp of failure handling mechanisms, unifying logging, metric ingestion, and error management, which decreased upstream errors by 7% and reduced data ingestion by 20% through improved code structure and design patterns.
  • Implemented robust failure handling, including fallback mechanisms for data operations, auto-rollback for system failures, and circuit breakers, ensuring high system stability and data integrity.
  • Standardized and consolidated critical workflows, including test rule archival, Kafka event schema generation, data backfill, production mirroring, and analytical pipelines for OLAP DBs (sync and async).
  • Spearheaded critical application upgrades, including migrating from Java 8 to 17, significantly improving maintainability by reducing JAR sizes through dependency cleanups and API deprecation.
  • Restructured and unified Data Access Object (DAO) and database interaction layers for Aerospike, establishing new team-wide architectural patterns.
  • Guided the design and implementation of rule failure alerting, integrating with monitoring tools to detect abnormal spikes and block rates, and re-modeled API layers for broader service adoption.
  • Led the design for multi-vendor investigation, transitioning from a reactive human-driven approach to an automated, scheduled system, optimizing cost and efficiency in data sourcing.
  • Designed a comprehensive testing suite with CSV upload support and real-time context enrichment capabilities via data mutators.
  • Developed a robust storage management strategy for efficient handling of result information and downstream triggers.
  • Provided technical leadership, leading disaster recovery (DR) drills, overseeing database migration activities, mentoring team members, and conducting interviews for platform engineering roles.

Engineering Development Intern

PhonePe

Jan 2022 - Jun 2022

Contributed to backend development and data engineering initiatives within a leading fintech platform.

  • Optimized rule performance by developing confusion matrix methods for anomaly detection and leveraging Hive for big data queries; implemented Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs) on Aerospike for efficient data procurement.
  • Applied optimized rule performance methods for A/B testing and traffic shaping within the Experimentation platform.

Engineering Development Intern

PhonePe

May 2021 - Jul 2021

Focused on data pipeline development and clustering for location-based services.

  • Devised an ETL pipeline using Spark for generating Top K locations and implementing geofencing capabilities.
  • Reused multi-density clustering techniques to enhance location-based insights.

Education

Information Technology

Indian Institute of Information Technology, Allahabad

Jul 2018 - Jun 2022

Courses

  • Artificial Intelligence and Automation (Minor)
  • Data Structures and Algorithms
  • Object-Oriented Programming
  • Database Management Systems
  • Operating Systems
  • Machine Learning
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Deep Learning
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • System Design

Projects

MuDi Stream (Multi-density Clustering for Live Data Stream)

Mar 2021 - Mar 2021

A project focused on classifying random datastreams using multi-density clustering.

Instagram Bot Detector (Random Forest Classifier)

Jul 2019 - Aug 2019

Developed a random forest classifier to distinguish farming bots from human users.

Awards

PhonePe-group Hackathon Finalist

PhonePe

Jan 2024

Achieved finalist standing for developing an English to Multi-DSL converter using ChatGPT APIs.

PhonePe Bootcamp Hackathon - 1st Place

PhonePe

Jan 2022

Secured 1st place for developing an End-to-End Functional Shopping Platform.

Student Welfare Council Secretary

SWC Gymkhana

Sep 2020

Served as Student Welfare Council Secretary, contributing to student welfare initiatives.

IIITA B-Hack - Most Innovative Idea

IIITA

Jan 2020

Recognized for the most innovative idea in Track-2 Business.

New Gen IEDC - 3rd Place

New Gen IEDC

Jan 2019

Awarded 3rd place for the Instagram Bot Detector project.

Inter-year Football Championship - 2nd Place

IIT Allahabad

Jan 2018

Achieved 2nd place in the Inter-year Football Championship in both 2018 and 2019.

JEE Mains - 99.71 Percentile

Joint Entrance Examination (JEE)

Jan 2018

Achieved 99.71 percentile in the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Mains.

JEE Advanced - 99.57 Percentile

Joint Entrance Examination (JEE)

Jan 2018

Achieved 99.57 percentile in the Joint Entrance Examination (JEE) Advanced.

Publications

Demand response optimization for Microgrid Clusters

IIT KGP (Presented at 12th ICCCNT)

May 2021

Co-authored and presented research on 'Demand response optimization for Microgrid Clusters' at the 12th ICCCNT, coordinating a team of 5. The work involved simulating a dynamic environment with an LSTM Model and implementing various Deep Reinforcement Learning models (Policy-based, Reinforce Agent, Value-Policy Hybrid, Asynchronous Advantageous Actor-Critic (A3C)). Successfully ran multiple models in parallel on a local CUDA setup, identifying and resolving PyTorch multiprocessing limitations.

Languages

English (Fluent) , Hindi (Native)

Skills

Tools & DevOps

  • Poetry
  • pip

Programming Languages & Frameworks

  • Java
  • Core Java
  • Python
  • Shell
  • Dropwizard
  • Service Discovery
  • Scala
  • asyncio
  • multiprocessing

Programming Languages & Frameworks

  • Go (golang)
  • go-routines
  • Node.js
  • JavaScript
  • C++
  • Django
  • Flask
  • FastAPI

Programming Languages & Frameworks

  • LaTeX
  • Prolog
  • Matlab
  • Lua
  • Pillow

Data Technologies

  • Aerospike
  • Spark
  • Kafka
  • Hive
  • Airflow
  • Redis
  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB

Data Technologies

  • Avro
  • MariaDB
  • Elastic Search
  • Numpy
  • Hadoop
  • Caffeine Cache
  • MVEL

Data Technologies

  • GraphDB
  • HBase
  • ProtoBuf

ML/AI & Data Science

  • Machine Learning
  • Deep Learning
  • Artificial Intelligence
  • Reinforcement Learning
  • Data Mining
  • Anomaly Detection
  • Clustering
  • Analytics

ML/AI & Data Science

  • PyTorch
  • TensorFlow
  • CUDA

ML/AI & Data Science

  • Hugging Face
  • Ollama

Tools & DevOps

  • UNIX
  • Git
  • Jenkins
  • Docker
  • Apache Maven
  • Jira
  • CI/CD
  • Grafana

Tools & DevOps

  • Marathon
  • Mesos
  • A/B Testing
  • Obsidian
  • vim
  • Ops-genie
  • Confluence
  • Prometheus
  • AWS

Core Concepts & Methodologies

  • Algorithms
  • Data Structures
  • System Design
  • Performance Optimization
  • Asynchronous Programming
  • Multiprocessing
  • Design Patterns
  • Big Data Management and Analytics
  • Maintainability
  • Data Modeling
  • Data Warehousing
  • Problem-Solving
  • Backend
  • Performance Tuning
  • Software Development

Core Concepts & Methodologies

  • Research
  • Convex Optimization

Leadership & Product

  • Leadership
  • Mentoring
  • Product Strategy
  • Process Improvement
  • Stakeholder Management