Backend / Platform Engineer

Kiruthikaa Palaniappan

7+ years across Poshmark, Walmart, and SAP

Software engineer focused on backend platforms, distributed systems, APIs, and high-impact product infrastructure across e-commerce, healthcare, and enterprise software.

  • SF Bay Area, California
  • Permanent Resident
  • No sponsorship needed
  • Java
  • Python
  • Distributed Systems

Experience

Backend and platform work at scale

Poshmark

Software Engineer

September 2024 - Present
  • Designed and implemented the alpha backend for conversational AI search, building microservices for personalized product discovery.
  • Built a brand asset ingestion pipeline supporting seasonal updates across 30K+ brands for a major app redesign.
  • Enabled a new shipping provider in 6 weeks with customs, refunds, and packing-slip support, saving $1.1M annually.
  • Developed a Flask backend for an AI look generator using Poshmark APIs and OpenAI image generation, producing 596 looks in a 7-day sprint.

Walmart Global Tech

Software Development Engineer

June 2019 - April 2021
  • Reduced daily manual pricing effort from about 5 hours to 45 minutes by automating workflows and optimizing HiveQL queries.
  • Built the core price-determination algorithm and Kafka-based microservices for a cloud pharmacy pricing platform.
  • Worked with Hadoop and Spark for scalable data processing and built Docker-based CI/CD pipelines for reliable service delivery.
  • Established early architecture and coding standards as the first engineer on the team.

SAP Labs

Software Developer

August 2015 - June 2019
  • Built RESTful Spring Boot services and RabbitMQ integrations to maintain data consistency between SAP S/4 Cloud and SAP Cloud Platform.
  • Developed microservices for Business Partner workflows and related enterprise data integration.
  • Created OData services for Business Partner, Product Master Data, and Plant Maintenance domains.

8billionminds.com

Volunteer Software Developer

November 2021 - September 2024
  • Migrated a legacy monolith toward a microservice-based architecture to improve scalability and maintainability.
  • Authored a proposal that secured $25,000 in NVIDIA Inception funding for an ML recommendation platform.
  • Supported beta delivery through testing, hot fixes, and onboarding of developer volunteers.

Skills

Core stack

Java Python Spring Boot Kafka MongoDB Microservices REST APIs SQL Postgres RabbitMQ Flask Ruby Hadoop Spark LLM Integration Prompt Engineering Git Agile

Education

Academic background

Arizona State University

Master's in Computer Science

February 2024 GPA 4.0