Kumaraguru Muthuraj
Architecting Reliable Systems at Enterprise Scale.
Senior Principal Engineer · Distributed Systems · Platform Modernization · Secure-by-Design Architect · AI Platforms
LinkedIn | GitHub | Kumaraguru1976@yahoo.com | +91 9880292215
Summary
Senior Principal Engineer with 20+ years of experience architecting large-scale, high-availability enterprise systems across payroll, fintech, and distributed platforms. Proven track record leading multi-year modernization initiatives, securing production systems at scale, and delivering zero-defect rollouts serving 90K+ enterprise clients.
Core Competencies
- Foundational - Data Structures and Algorithms, Design Patterns, Concurrency, Mathematics.
- Machine Learning and AI - Python, NLP, Pandas, NumPy, Seaborn, Matplotlib, Rasa, Keras, Tensorflow, Excel, Product Recommendation Systems.
- Generative and Agentic AI - Crew AI, ChatGPT (APIs and Prompt Engineering), Github Copilot.
- Languages - Java, Java EE, Visual C++, C# .NET, T-SQL, PL/SQL.
- Cloud and Frameworks - Amazon Web Services, Microservices, Spring Framework (Spring Boot, Spring Cloud Gateway, Reactor), Apigee, OpenRewrite.
- Databases - Database Modelling, SQL Server, Sybase, Oracle.
- NoSQL and Search - Elasticsearch.
- Testing - Gatling, JUnit, TestNG, Mockito, Automator.
- DevOps & CICD - Jenkins, Gradle, Maven, Docker.
- Monitoring & Analytics - Splunk.
- Security - Certified in Data Protection (CDP), Threat Modelling (STRIDE-LM), Checkmarx (OWASP), IriusRisk, OPSWAT APIs, Kount.
- Additional Tools & Technologies - Redis, Kafka, Scala, Kubernetes, Groovy, Apache Spark, Jira, Coverity Code Analyzer, Git, Unix Shell scripting, Lua.
Professional Experience
ADP India Pvt Ltd, Hyderabad, India
- Building an Agentic AI - driven platform for policy assignment, tax-jurisdiction and withholding decisions, significantly improving accuracy, reducing manual practitioner effort, and accelerating policy resolution workflows.
- Solutions Architect for Canada NG Payroll - Enforcing architectural excellence through high-impact design and code reviews.
- Drove Metadata-based Policy enablement for Canada Payroll by validating policy-specific handling across use cases, ensuring high quality and no US Payroll regressions.
- Architect for the Recruitment feature stack (2024 - 2025) - Built and delivered a stable, resilient, high-throughput, scalable Office365 attachments service handling ~1400 x 1MB uploads per node every hour.
- Delivered a resilient integration architecture enabling compliant data exchange between ADP Recruitment Management and Workforce Now Recruitment Management platforms.
- Architect for the Performance Management and Benefits stack (2022 - 2024), enabling cross-functional feature development at scale.
- Built and deployed a Spring Cloud Gateway-based API Gateway for OneLMS, achieving 1ms 95th percentile domain resolution latency using Redis caching and Project Reactor.
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Led a complex, multi-phase upgrade of ~70 Maven repositories from Spring Boot 2.2 to 3.2.1 over 12 months:
- Phase 1: Spring Boot 2.2 → 2.7.9 via OpenRewrite. Authored custom migration recipes (e.g., SpringFox → SpringDoc).
- Phase 2: Migrated WFN from JDK 11 to JDK 17.
- Phase 3: Upgraded to Spring Boot 3.2.1, Hibernate 6, Kafka, Redis, OpenAPI.
- Impact: Modernized 150 microservices used by 90K+ client companies managing petabyte-scale data across 90 shards, with zero production issues, zero rollback, 90% CVE reduction, and enhanced developer productivity.
- Designed and delivered a lightweight Java-based Feature Toggle SDK, supporting local caching, strategy evaluation, and async usage reporting. Improved response time and reduced integration complexity for feature teams.
- Enhanced VirusScan framework using OPSWAT MetaDefender Core, integrating 10+ antivirus engines and Deep Content Disarm & Reconstruction (DeepCDR).
- Led the resolution of 50+ security vulnerabilities across Talent and Performance modules using IriusRisk threat modeling.
- Guided Performance & Benefits teams to remediate 100+ security issues flagged by Checkmarx SAST, improving product security posture.
- Designed 'EasyTZ', an NLP-based ML model to auto-generate test cases for QA automation, increasing test coverage and reducing manual effort.
- Built a sentiment analysis ML model for real-time insights from user-submitted Pendo Alerts, enabling data-driven UX improvements.
- Championed process and NFR enhancements to enable daily production deployments, improving agility and release velocity.
- Skills – Java 11+, Spring Boot, Microservices, Spring Cloud Gateway, OpenRewrite, Kafka, Redis, Python, Machine Learning (NLP, Sentiment Analysis), OPSWAT, Checkmarx, IriusRisk, GitHub Copilot.
Topcoder – Telstra, Hyderabad, India
- Built an NLP-based ML tool in Python to analyze Splunk error-alert emails, classify alerts, and surface top microservice issues - enhancing engineer productivity and issue resolution time.
- Integrated Science Logic and MNaaS apps with Java-based microservices for Trouble Ticketing and Data Access APIs. Enabled secure backend access to ServiceNow using MASSL and OAuth, and managed traffic via Apigee.
- Diagnosed platform issues on PCF using Splunk for observability and root cause analysis.
- Skills – Python 3, Java 8, Spring Boot Microservices, Apigee.
Topcoder – Cisco, Bengaluru, India
- Engineered high-scale Gatling load tests for Contact Center Data APIs, simulating 3.5K–5K concurrent users over 8-hour test cycles. Integrated into Jenkins CI/CD as a configurable job for automated performance validation.
- Developed a scalable, stable, resilient, and configurable data generation framework in Python to simulate 960,000 contacts – 6000 agents interactions using Elasticsearch bulk APIs. Generated ~12 million records/day, scaling up to ~1 billion records over 90 days across four index types, enabling realistic test scenarios for performance benchmarking.
- Skills – Python 3, Gatling, Scala, Jenkins, Groovy, Elasticsearch, Docker, Jira.
TradeParallel, Bengaluru, India
- Developing desktop and cloud-based, high probability, stock trade signaling tools for the Indian retail stock trader, using charting and technical analysis.
- Developed NIFTY Scanners based on simple moving averages, Bollinger bands and OTA odds-enhancers with Python to identify the demand-supply zones.
- Explored Machine Learning based algorithmic trading techniques to predict high probability stock trade signals. Reduce risk and generate consistent revenue to achieve 0.9 strike rate.
- Skills - Java 8, Python 3, Pandas, Numpy, Seaborn, Matplotlib, Jupyter Notebook.
Intuit, Inc., Mountain View, California, USA
- Technical Lead for the QuickBooks Online Payroll Canada team of 7 engineers, reification of non-functional and functional requirements, mentoring, design and code reviews.
- Designed and authored the highly scalable, reliable, configurable Autotask for Encryption of EIN in the US Database and PII (Personally Identifiable Information) in the Canada database with Java Executor Service, Concurrency and Intuit Data Protection and Encryption service. 100% automation of generation of SQL with metadata for target database tables. This was a prerequisite for migration to AWS. ~120,000 Canada companies were encrypted within 9 hours and zero defects in production. Augmented the Autotask with a comprehensive functional test suite and units to achieve zero defects.
- ShipBoyAnalyzer - Reduced thread dump analysis time from hours to minutes by authoring a regex based tunable tool for ShipBoy alerts to identify high probability thread contention classes and methods.
- Refactored System Offline Ticket utilities (Bill Pugh Singletons) with caching to reduce latency, increase responsiveness, simplify usage, improve extensibility, and improve developer productivity.
- Integrated 13 vulnerable features with Kount (and IOvation disablement) for payroll fraud detection and prevention, that resulted in 18% additional fraud detection and prevention.
- Sanity tests - Reduced defect incidence by authoring a complete suite of Sanity tests for Canada Payroll with TestNG (with 13 critical test suites) and migrated them to Mockito.
- Deprecated ~15 SOAP Payroll APIs and migrated the clients to standard REST APIs enabling Payroll journey to AWS.
- Coordinated with ~50 PayrollAPI client teams to move away from .net to .com endpoints in Intuit Hosting Platform datacenter, enabling Payroll journey to AWS.
- Improved security by migrating non-standard services consumed by Payroll to standard APIs behind the Intuit Gateway - Case360 (Document store) and View My Paycheck applications, enabling Payroll journey to AWS.
- Eliminated ~1 hour of manual effort per deployment in pre-production environments by Continuous Integration and Deployment of Payroll Routing Service for AWS in Jenkins, Docker and Kubernetes.
- Increased Canada Payroll subscriptions by 7% by delivering the “Additional Pay Types” feature, validated via Splunk Analytics.
- Reduced support calls by 3% by sun-setting House-hold US payroll.
- Optimized QBO-Payroll performance during peak season through Splunk-driven analytics of top slow queries.
- Eliminated ~25 feature flags and ~80 dead code files from the data mined-out of BusinessHolidays refactoring, improving maintainability and reducing code complexity through data-driven refactoring.
- Book Clubs - Drove the weekly book club for 5 months on Java Concurrency in Practice (Brian Goetz) and You Don′t Know JS (Kyle Simpson).
- Skills - Java EE, Spring, Spring Boot, Microservices, Servlets, JSP, JSF, EclipseLink (on GlassFish, Tomcat), MS SQL Server, Jenkins, Docker, Kubernetes. Agile - SCRUM, Kanban, Unit testing with TestNG, Jira.
Intuit, Bengaluru, India
- Technical Lead for QuickBooks Online Payroll Canada team of 5 engineers, QuickBooks Desktop team, reification of non-functional and functional requirements, mentoring, design and code reviews.
- Interviewed over 185 candidates across levels (Architect to campus hires), contributing to building Intuit IDC as a high-performance engineering hub.
- Led large-scale Banking Holidays Refactoring across ~450 files (DB, Java, JSP, JS, external integrations), enabling Canada Direct Deposit-directly contributing to ~50,000 new paid subscriptions with zero production incidents.
- Delivered Remittance Frequencies feature, validated via business surveys to boost subscriptions by 5%.
- Built regex-powered productivity tools in Java to accelerate defect root cause analysis for QBDT and Online Payroll teams.
- Led PaaF (Payments as a Feature) in the Payments Solutions Division-refactored WPF project to adopt event-based MVVM, leading to ~80,000 merchant onboardings in 4 months.
- Developed Medicare Tax and Safety Net features in Employee Management Solutions; recognized by QA for zero defects, reducing support call volume by ~2%.
- Project Rainbow - Built an SDK-based automated testing tool (Git hooks equivalent) that compares functional behavior of code delta vs. baseline, improving developer productivity and QA efficiency.
- Technical Lead for QuickBooks Calendar - Delivered through an event-driven MVVM architecture in WPF and custom caching layer (100ms response time) - contributed to increased customer adoption.
- Initiative manager and technical lead for Compiler migration from Visual Studio 2008 to 2010 - Strategized Perforce branching, planned, estimated, and executed the project. Removed STL and migrated to VS libraries. Performance of native libraries were measured to be better.
- As the initiative manager for Coverity defect fixing project, coordinated the entire QB Desktop team of ~150 engineers and fixed more than 1900 defects and earned an iPad.
- Owned engineering for QuickBooks SDK with deep focus on EdLists (cache), Transactions, Multi-Currency, and Accountant′s Copy. Delivered zero-incident refactoring, major performance enhancements, and stable API development.
- Bedrock - Performance improvement with direct DB access for SDK through Bedrock layer with double XSLT transformations, reducing object-XML conversion, bypassing biz-logic for reads, giving 10X performance gains.
- Functional test automation with Java based Automator, QB SDK API development.
- Skills - Java EE, Servlets, JSP, JSF, JavaScript, EclipseLink, C# .NET, WPF, MVVM, VC++, XML, XSLT, MS SQL Server, Automator, Unit testing with TestNG, Agile - SCRUM, Jira.
Previous Work Experience (1999 – 2005)
- Hewlett Packard ISO / GDIC, Bangalore, India · Senior Software Engineer · August 2003 – November 2005
- i2 Technologies, Bangalore, India · Software Engineer · May 2002 – July 2003
- Tarang Software Technologies, Bangalore, India · Software Engineer · June 2001 – April 2002
- Savantech.com India Pvt., Ltd., Bangalore, India · Software Engineer · June 2000 – May 2001
- Tata Infotech, Bangalore, India · Associate Systems Engineer · June 1999 – May 2000
Education
- Interview Kickstart – Backend Engineering Program (November 2024 – March 2025) · Completed a 5-month intensive program covering Advanced Data Structures, System Design, Problem Solving, and Engineering Leadership – sharpening architectural depth and backend problem-solving excellence at scale.
- Advanced Certificate Program in GenerativeAI from Upgrad. (December 2023 – May 2024).
- Certified in Data Protection – CDP, GDPR from IMI.
- IIIT, Bangalore, Karnataka, PGD in Machine Learning and Artificial Intelligence (October 2020 - November 2021).
- PSG College of Technology, Bharathiar University - MCA, Computer Software · (1996 - 1999).
- Kongunadu Arts and Science College, Bharathiar University - B.Sc., Mathematics · (1993 - 1996).