PANKAJ SAINI

Phone: 9871475918,
Email:[email protected]

SUMMARY

Senior Engineering leader with 23 years of hands-on experience in architecting and engineering large scale monetization, payment and engagement platforms, cloud transformations and micro services across media, ecommerce, gaming and telecom industries. Adept in DevOps, SRE, observability, governance and zero-downtime releases. Continues to code actively. Ex: ZEE5, Paytm, Shaadi.com, Nazara Games and India Today, among others.

TECHNOLOGY SKILLS

Back-end: Java, Python, Spring Boot, Django, PHP, Kafka, Redis, ScyllaDB, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, BigQuery, MySQL. Front-end: React, Angular, TypeScript. Cloud: AWS, GCP, Azure.
DevOps: Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Jankins, GitHub Actions, GitLab CI, Nginx.

PROFESSIONAL PROFILE
Director of Engineering, Zee Entertainment Enterprises Limited. Bangalore. (Apr 2021 – Dec 2025)

Customer issues with subscriptions and payments were eroding the app’s ratings. Managed a team of 40 engineers to migrate ZEE5’s legacy monolithic platform for subscriptions, payments and offers to a next-gen, cloud-agnostic microservices architecture capable of handling 18,000+ TPM, supporting ZEE5’s annual revenue of INR 970 crore.

Built configurable payment gateway integration, pricing and offers engine, and real-time tracking and reporting features.

Handled backward compatibility with legacy systems while migrating and auditing historic data.

Used Java Spring Boot, Python, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Spanner DB and Redis.

Outcome delivered:

o Reduced 95th percentile payment processing latency from 2.1 seconds to 290 milliseconds.
o Successfully handled peak of 18,000 TPM (40% above target).
o Business agility improved by reducing price experimentation launch cycles from quarterly to weekly. o Reduced payment gateway fees by 15% through intelligent routing.
o Achieved 99% uptime post-migration with zero data loss.

Head Technology Operations, Globocom Infotech Private Limited. Mumbai. (Dec 2018 – Apr 2021) Globocom is a technology services company helping telecom businesses improve CLTV through personalized user experience

and engagement.

Built a real-time bidding (RTB) ad exchange platform from the ground up using Java, MySQL and Redis.

Capable of processing 100 million+ ad transactions while maintaining 100ms SLA for bid responses using pre-computation.

Integrated with 50+ DSPs covering 200+ publishers serving over 500 million daily users.

Built distributed, multi-layered caching strategy with circuit brakers, anomaly detection, and analytics data pipelines.

Outcome delivered:

o Peak throughput of 15,000+ RPS, real-time decisioning at 5000+ QPS. o 99.99% uptime using multi-AZ deployment with automated failover.
o Delivered 25% higher win rates through optimized bidding.

General Manager Technology, Nazara Games Limited. Mumbai. (Sep 2015 – Dec 2018)
• Led the delivery of large scale games and digital products with strong adherence to SLAs, KPIs and operational excellence.

Associate Director Technology, Shaadi.com (People Interactive). MUmbai. (Apr 2012 – Sep 2015) • Led the development of the mobile product and improved the system scalability and reliability of the web platform.

EARLY CAREER:

Technical Director at Planet 41 Mobi Venture Ltd (Nov 2010 – Jun 2012), Project Leader at I2I Telesource Pvt. Ltd (Nov 2009 – Oct 2010), Tech Lead at Paytm / One97 Communication Ltd (Oct 2007 – Nov 2009), Associate Manager at India Today Group (May 2005 – Oct 2007), Software Engineer at Primus Software Solutions (Feb 2003 – May 2005).

EDUCATION

MBA Computer Information Systems – National Institute of Management, Mumbai – 2009.

MCA – Delhi Vidyapeeth, New Delhi – 2006.

BCA – Delhi Vidyapeeth, New Delhi – 2004.

CERTIFICATIONS

AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate (SAA-C03).

AI Accountability: Build Responsible and Transparent Systems.

Agile Project Leadership.