Professional Summary

Full-stack & platform engineer with 8+ years architecting distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, and AI-integrated applications across GCP, Azure, and on-prem. Owns technical direction end to end—identifying the high-leverage path through ambiguous problems and delivering it from planning to production, whether a risk-critical database migration, platform-wide performance work, or a GenAI product shipped solo. Combines deep technical expertise with client-facing communication in research and enterprise settings.

Technical Skills

Languages: TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Java, Dart, Ruby, C#, Zsh/Bash

Frontend: Next.js, React, Vue, Flutter, SurveyJS, Material UI, Tailwind

Backend: Spring Boot, FastAPI, Node.js (Hapi/Express), Ruby on Rails, Supabase

Databases: PostgreSQL (pgvector, Drizzle ORM, pgBackRest, TimescaleDB, foreign data wrappers), BigQuery, RabbitMQ, Redis, MySQL, MongoDB

Cloud & DevOps: GCP (GKE, Cloud Run, IAM, Logging), Azure (Container Apps, AI Foundry), Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, Pulumi, Bicep, GitHub Actions

AI/ML: LangChain, Azure OpenAI, Groq, MLFlow, TensorFlow/Keras, Weights & Biases

Auth & Security: Auth0, Keycloak (OAuth2.0/OIDC), Row-Level Security, network sandboxing (nftables, mitmproxy), traffic analysis (Zeek, tshark, tcpdump)

Third-Party Integrations: Twilio, Mailgun, Brevo, Metabase

Experience

Software Engineer | Aug 2020 - Present | Applied Artificial Intelligence Institute (A2I2), Deakin University, Melbourne, AU

Principal Responsibilities

Primary technical contact for Deakin’s GCP Subject Matter Expert; drive security initiatives and enterprise-grade implementations across multiple GCP projects.
Budget technical infrastructure for 5+ research grant applications, evolving processes for improved forecasting reliability.
Mentor developers in modern technologies, cloud platforms, and best practices.
Architect monitoring, alerting, and governance policies across multi-project infrastructure with 2 billing accounts.
Lead CI/CD initiatives including GitHub Actions migration, comprehensive code reviews, and technical documentation.
Conduct security audits, performance optimization, and feasibility assessments for third-party integrations.
Built AI-assisted engineering tooling, including a Claude-based platform-wide log-analysis workflow.

Project: Conductor (2020 - Present)

Cloud Infrastructure & Platform Engineering

Manage multi-cloud infrastructure across Google Cloud Platform with comprehensive cost analysis for research grant applications.
Implement Infrastructure-as-Code using Terraform and Pulumi to provision IAM policies, Workload Identity Federation pools, GCS buckets, Secret Manager, Compute Engine, Cloud Run/Functions, and monitoring/alerting resources—refactoring shared modules for reuse across multiple projects.
Migrated cluster authentication to Workload Identity Federation with Secret Manager, eliminating static service-account keys.
Led Spring Boot migration from 2.2.7 to 3.3.4 with zero downtime for platform serving hundreds of research participants.
Architect GCP observability at scale: log-based metrics, uptime checks, and alert policies for database, node-scaling, message-queue, and load-balancer health, routed to dedicated Slack channels.
Optimize Kubernetes resource consumption using custom capacity-analysis tooling, achieving significant hosting cost reductions.
Pro-active mitigated multiple critical security vulnerabilities throughout the project’s lifespan.
Built a hardened, network-isolated sandbox (Docker, non-root, nftables egress control, mitmproxy TLS interception) to safely execute and audit untrusted third-party tooling—capturing and inspecting all outbound traffic, including JVM TLS, to vet what open-source dependency tools exfiltrate.
Migrate to managed SSL certificates across multiple domains.
Hardened production disaster recovery with resilient backup pipelines and failure diagnostics.

Application Development

Contribute to and review code for a complex asynchronous distributed system involving AI, Postgres, SpringBoot, RabbitMQ, etc.
Implement contract testing using Pact with guidelines for team adoption.
Established centralized dependency management with OpenRewrite integration for automated updates.

Platform Modernization & Performance (2025 - Present)

Led an in-place PostgreSQL 11→18 / TimescaleDB upgrade of a ~300GB production cluster on Kubernetes, reducing downtime from days to minutes via a rehearsed, snapshot-based migration strategy.
Added GraalVM native-image support across all Java services with a benchmarking harness for faster startup and lower resource footprint.
Upgraded Spring Boot from 3.3.4 to 3.5.x and rolled out ECS structured logging platform-wide.
Modernized toolchain: migrated frontend from npm to pnpm and CI to Node 24 LTS.

Project: CARES (2025 - Present)

Full-Stack Development & Generative AI Integration

Sole-engineer delivering a clinical survey platform in 6 weeks for overseas conference demonstration, translating an 1800+ question psychological assessment instrument into SurveyJS with integrated GenAI workflows.
Integrated Azure AI Foundry to elicit comprehensive, clinically-relevant responses from UK families reporting children’s mental health concerns, reducing clinician-family communication cycles.
Built production solution using Next.js with TypeScript, SurveyJS for dynamic form generation, and Drizzle ORM for type-safe database operations.
Deployed on Azure Container Apps with MLFlow for experiment tracking, implementing TDD in an unfamiliar tech stack under strict deadline.
Provisioned Azure infrastructure with Bicep IaC—Container Registry, Container Apps, Blob Storage, and Functions—with a PowerShell auto-stop runbook for cost control.
Engineered a resilient async pipeline with Dead Letter Queue handling and a self-hosted, auth-secured MLFlow deployment for experiment tracking.
Built a survey ETL pipeline converting the 1800+ question instrument to SurveyJS with DSM-5 mapping, conditional visibility, and PII filtering of children’s identifiers.
Serve as primary client liaison with BlackDog Institute, translating clinical requirements into technical specifications.

Project: MemoryAid (2025 - Present)

Mobile Development & Backend Architecture

Established Supabase backend architecture including schema design with linting, Row-Level Security policies, pgTap testing, and edge functions for multi-database operations.
Implemented Flutter/Dart mobile application with local storage and Supabase integration.
Developed reliable data migration pipelines between Conductor and Supabase platforms.
Contributed to project direction through technical documentation and pull request reviews.

Project: Living Knowledge (2024)

Machine Learning & AI Engineering

Architected PDF processing solutions leveraging GPT-3/4 integration with fuzzy matching and semantic search for document analysis.
Implemented database solutions using pgvector and tsvector for vector similarity and full-text search.
Deployed containerized MLFlow experiment tracking infrastructure for reproducible ML workflows.
Developed proficiency with open-source LLMs and SLURM cluster management for HPC environments.

Project: Cognitive Reviewer (2023)

Full-Stack Development

Authored engineering specifications for user feedback collection systems, leading full-stack implementation from design to deployment.
Developed RESTful APIs using FastAPI, establishing comprehensive Python testing frameworks.
Implemented frontend features using React for cognitive assessment tools.

Software Engineer | Mar 2019 - Jun 2020 | Deakin University, Melbourne, AU

Led engineering and product ownership across projects using React, Hapi, MySQL, MongoDB, Redis, Socket.io, and PostgreSQL.
Primary technical liaison for multiple clients, managing stakeholder expectations while implementing Agile methodologies.
Developed standards for secure, maintainable code and deployments using Docker Swarm and docker-compose.

Project: Educator Health Reporting System (2019-2020)

Developed backend using Hapi framework integrating with REDCap API, syncing participant data across systems with Sequelize ORM.
Designed 4NF database schema and migrated ~19K records using parallel batch processing.
Built React frontend with Material UI, iterating wireframes with stakeholders using Balsamiq and Adobe XD.

Project: Overseer (2019)

Engineered containerized Ruby application for executing and evaluating untrusted student code submissions within the OnTrack learning management system.
Developed Ruby gem for shared functionality between Overseer and OnTrack with RabbitMQ integration via Bunny.

Casual Academic | Mar 2019 - Jun 2020 | Deakin University, Melbourne, AU

Tutored Object-Oriented Programming (C#), Data Structures & Algorithms, and IoT Software Architecture using AWS and IBM Cloud.

Software Engineer Intern | Nov 2018 - Feb 2019 | Deakin University, Melbourne, AU

Developed React frontend and Hapi/MongoDB backend applications. Executed Agile spikes and authored technical documentation using UML methodologies.

Freelance Software Developer | Jul 2016 - Jan 2018 | India

Built mobile applications using Qt and Android with Node.js and Ruby on Rails backends. Deployed WordPress solutions with optimized Nginx configurations.

Education

Masters of IT (Professional) | 2019 | Deakin University, Melbourne, AU

Specialization in Cyber Security

Minor thesis on automatic assessment systems led to Project Overseer implementation.

B.Tech in Computer Science | 2016 | LPU, India

Majors in Software Engineering

Open Source

doubtfire-api: github.com/doubtfire-lms/doubtfire-api
smartCapitaliseJs: akashagarwal7.github.io/smartCapitaliseJs