Swapnil Birkhede

Lead the engineering teams behind four payment products — Netbanking, Wallets, TokenHQ, and MandateHQ — owning architecture, delivery, reliability, and the growth of the organization.

• Architected and delivered the NB+ platform — a next-generation netbanking stack with intelligent routing, retry logic, and issuer-level optimizations that improved payment success rates.
• Integrated wallets with multiple banking partners and SDK providers, extending payment-method coverage across a base of 10M+ merchants.
• Owned the Smart Collect roadmap and delivery, enabling automated reconciliation for enterprise clients and reducing manual effort by 60%.
• Owned incident response for payment failures across Netbanking and Wallet flows, driving RCA to resolution within SLA for 95%+ of P1/P2 incidents.
• Cut recurring payment failures by 40% through proactive Grafana monitoring dashboards and automated alerting pipelines.
• Unblocked cross-team dependencies with Platform, Risk, and Compliance to ship RBI-mandated tokenization and e-mandate features on time.
• Built the payments engineering squad from scratch (2 → 14 engineers), owning hiring, onboarding, and mentoring across all levels.
• Established engineering career tracks and ran performance calibration cycles; promoted 3 engineers within 2 review cycles.
• Decomposed the legacy netbanking monolith into modular, independently deployable services, reducing deployment lead-time by 3×.
• Introduced AI-driven debugging pipelines that reduced mean time to identify root cause by 50% for production incidents.
• Built agentic systems that auto-generate and publish the pod's weekly OpEx matrix — pulling incident, SLO, deployment, and code-quality signals from Jira/DevRev, Grafana, and GitHub into a single scorecard.
• Embedded LLM agents across the SDLC — requirement breakdown, code review, test generation, and release-readiness checks — built on LangChain agents and MCP tooling.
• Grounded agent output with RAG over runbooks, API specs, and incident history, and evaluated open-source LLaMA models against hosted LLMs on accuracy, latency, cost, and data residency.

• Engineering Management
• Payments
• Agentic AI
• System Design
• Reliability

Led delivery of mission-critical banking applications for the Reserve Bank of India, from requirements through to production.

• Led a team of 6 engineers delivering banking applications for the RBI, managing end-to-end SDLC from requirements to production.
• Delivered 3 major releases on schedule with zero critical production defects, earning client commendation for quality and reliability.
• Drafted technical architecture documents and project plans, and introduced Agile ceremonies that improved delivery predictability.
• Served as the primary client interface for RBI stakeholders, translating regulatory needs into technical specifications.

• Banking
• Regulatory
• Team Leadership
• Architecture

Led a cross-functional team delivering card management and payment processing platforms for banking clients across India and Southeast Asia.

• Led a cross-functional engineering team delivering card management and payment processing solutions for banking clients across India and Southeast Asia.
• Managed the full project lifecycle for 2 card-issuing platforms — installation, implementation, UAT, and go-live.
• Introduced structured sprint planning and release management, achieving a 25% reduction in delivery overruns.

• Card Management
• Payments
• Release Management

Built the technical foundation of my payments career — real-time card authorization, dispute resolution, and high-throughput transaction processing.

• Led R&D on real-time card authorization and dispute-resolution modules for 3 banking clients.
• Built reusable components for multi-threaded transaction processing, improving throughput by 2× on existing infrastructure.
• Developed card payment and transaction processing systems with Java, Spring MVC, Socket Programming, and PostgreSQL.

• Java
• Card Payments
• Transaction Processing
• PostgreSQL

Where the professional journey began — process excellence and early tooling in a high-accuracy operations environment.

• Provided healthcare claims adjudication for a US client, processing 500+ claims daily at 99.2% accuracy.
• Led Six Sigma Yellow Belt projects in risk management and performance improvement, achieving a 15% reduction in process cycle time.
• Built internal tools — a Benefit Research Site and a Time Tracker (Java, MySQL) — adopted across the BPS unit.

• Process Excellence
• Six Sigma
• Tooling