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Zijian Zhou

@zijianzhou

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Senior Java backend engineer architecting microservices for fintech and customer-lending platforms.

United Arab Emirates

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What I'm looking for

I’m looking for a backend role where I can own microservices end-to-end, build event-driven workflows, and drive performance engineering—especially in fintech-like domains—while leveraging AI coding tools to speed up delivery from spec to merged PR.

I’m a Senior Software Engineer with 6+ years architecting Java backend systems across fintech, insurance, and e-commerce, owning microservices end-to-end for marketing/coupon platforms, post-lending collection, billing, and lending.

In my recent role, I architect and own end-to-end delivery for a credit marketing/coupon platform powering CashNow—handling award definition, issuance, query, and use/rollback with two-phase lock/confirm semantics for cross-system consistency. I design event-driven campaign pipelines with RabbitMQ, sustain ~2.8k coupon grants/day in production, and build an internal operations console so non-engineering teams can configure and schedule campaigns without code changes.

Previously, I led SmartBilling, a configurable billing & reconciliation platform, delivering a rule engine that reduced rule-change development effort by 70% and automated reconciliation that cut manual finance workload by 50%. I’ve also built and stabilized high-concurrency flows by decoupling synchronous work into MQ-driven async pipelines, and I use Hystrix isolation and performance-focused SQL/API optimization to reduce cascading failures and improve throughput.

Experience

Work history, roles, and key accomplishments

Current

Senior Java Developer

Current

Astra Tech (via Estidama UAE)

Oct 2025 - Present (8 months)

Architected end-to-end backend for a credit marketing/coupon platform, including award definition/issuance and use/rollback with two-phase lock/confirm semantics, sustaining ~2.8k coupon grants per day in production. Built event-driven campaign pipelines with RabbitMQ and delivered an internal operations console enabling no-code campaign scheduling (AED 3.95M+ daily disbursement; AED 1.44B+ annual

Java 8 Spring Boot Dubbo RabbitMQ MyBatis MySQL Redis REST APIs Event Driven Architecture

Current

Senior Java Developer

Current

Astra Tech

Oct 2025 - Present (8 months)

Architected and owned end-to-end backend for CashNow’s marketing/coupon platform, defining, issuing, and managing award use/rollback flows with two-phase lock semantics for cross-system consistency. Sustained ~2.8k coupon grants/day in production and built Dubbo APIs plus RabbitMQ event-driven pipelines with idempotent retries; delivered an internal ops console enabling non-engineering teams to co

Spring Boot Apache Dubbo RabbitMQ MyBatis MySQL Redis Event Driven Architecture API Design

Senior Java Developer

ZhongAn Online P&C Insurance

Dec 2021 - Mar 2024 (2 years 3 months)

Led architecture and development of SmartBilling, a configurable billing and reconciliation platform supporting ¥35.7B+ annual gross written premium. Built a rule engine that reduced rule-change development effort by 70%, automated reconciliation cutting manual finance workload by 50%, and refactored billing/reconciliation for high concurrency by decoupling synchronous flows into MQ-driven async p

Spring Boot Java Backend API Integration SQL Optimization Microservices Architecture

Senior Java Developer

Shanghai Eitai Information Technology

Jun 2021 - Dec 2021 (6 months)

Contributed to a core e-commerce ERP by integrating third-party payment gateways (GlobalCollect and Braintree). Optimized slow APIs and SQL, improving response latency by 60%.

Java Payment Gateways GlobalCollect Braintree SQL Tuning

Java Developer

Zhangmen Education Inc.

Jan 2018 - Jun 2021 (3 years 5 months)

Led the core distribution platform for student registration and lead assignment across product lines, refactoring large transactional jobs and introducing async allocation to cut average response time by 40%. Implemented Hystrix thread-pool isolation during the 618 promotion to prevent cascading failures and migrated persistence from JPA to MyBatis, improving query performance by 70%; also optimiz