Open to opportunities

Ankita Pednekar

@ankitapednekar

Lead backend engineer building cloud-native fintech platforms with Java, event-driven architecture, and agentic AI automation.

India

Message

What I'm looking for

I’m seeking Staff or Lead Backend Engineer roles with remote-first preference, where I can own cloud-native backend architecture, event-driven systems, and production-grade Agentic AI/MCP automation while mentoring teams and enforcing quality standards.

I’m a Lead Backend Engineer with 10 years of IT experience, currently serving as Tech Lead for TIAA’s Secure Income Account (SIA), a mission-critical, cloud-native fixed annuity platform entering the 401K/Retirement market with guaranteed lifetime income.

I integrate with tier-1 recordkeepers (Empower, Vanguard, Vestwell, Transamerica) and asset managers (Northern Trust/Great Gray, Nuveen), and I’ve driven end-to-end technical ownership of the platform roadmap, architecture decisions, and engineering standards. I also delivered the “Empower integration” with a TIAA Titans Award and helped architect canonical data models and Apache Camel adapter patterns across multiple recordkeeper integrations.

I’m hands-on with Agentic AI & MCP—building production MCP servers for Jira, GitLab, and SonarQube to automate sprint planning, pipeline orchestration, and quality gate enforcement (cutting manual overhead by ~40%). I’ve also established LLM-driven SDLC practices (AI-authored JUnit/Cucumber tests and Kiro-powered code reviews), implemented KEDA for event-driven Kafka consumer autoscaling, and mentored 70+ engineers across distributed systems, cloud-native engineering, and TDD.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Tech Lead - Backend

Current

TIAA

Sep 2022 - Present (3 years 9 months)

Led end-to-end technical roadmap and architecture for TIAA’s cloud-native fixed annuity SIA platform entering the 401K/retirement market, integrating multiple recordkeepers. Built production MCP servers for Jira/GitLab/SonarQube and implemented LLM-driven SDLC practices, reducing manual overhead by ~40% and improving system efficiency by 20%.

Spring Boot Apache Camel Apache Kafka KEDA MCP Server Development

Senior Software Engineer

Mastek Ltd.

Mar 2021 - Sep 2022 (1 year 6 months)

Designed and delivered a high-volume notification engine for MCX (6–7M messages/day) using Kafka with sub-second delivery SLAs across email, SMS, and in-app channels. Automated reporting by 30% using validation/extraction scripts and built REST APIs and an EDMS for penalty tracking and due recovery.

Java 8 Spring Boot Apache Kafka REST APIs SQL Server Performance Tuning

Systems Engineer

Tata Consultancy Services

Jul 2016 - Mar 2021 (4 years 8 months)

Built full-stack digital investment account onboarding for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, including Java REST services, Angular UI, PL/SQL procedures, and JSON rule engines for real-time validation and dashboards. Led TCS Open Ignite training (70+ engineers) and maintained 90%+ JUnit/Mockito test coverage with SonarQube-based security and quality standards.

Angular Pl SQL JSON Rule Engine Junit Mockito SonarQube