Pooja Desai

I am a Senior Software Engineer with 9+ years building scalable, cloud-native backend systems focused on distributed architectures, real-time data processing, and platform reliability. I prioritize resilient design and measurable operational improvements.

At my current role I engineered high-scale Trust & Safety systems, designing a Kafka-based identity verification platform that processed over 2M verifications in 2025 and drove a 30% reduction in fraud. I also built observability pipelines using Datadog and Kibana to proactively detect anomalies and reduce fraud-related incidents by 45%.

Previously at Vendasta I led data modeling for a document editor, built high-performing systems using Temporal workflows, and implemented Elasticsearch to improve search performance. I helped create API-first integrations (including gRPC and Google Cloud APIs) that boosted revenue by 8.6% (~45k CAD/month) and mentored engineers on product and platform best practices.

In earlier roles I designed solutions using Neo4j, Cassandra and AWS Kinesis, delivered mass-update capabilities that cut operations time by 45%, and developed customer-facing features such as an EMI calculator that reduced salesforce dependency by 30%. I contribute to hiring, run on-call rotations, author system documentation, and drive reliability and scalability efforts across teams.