Bhushan Dhapodkar — Fintech Platform Engineer & AI Builder

About Me

Building reliable
payment systems at scale

I'm a Java backend engineer with 7+ years in fintech, currently at Nium, Mumbai. I own mission-critical payment platforms end to end — architecture, development, production operations, incident response, and continuous improvement.

My primary focus is the SEPA payment platform, one of the highest-traffic services in Nium's ecosystem. I've integrated 5+ payment gateways, architected and delivered 10+ production microservices with multi-container, scalable architecture, and manage the full payment lifecycle — initiation, processing, settlement, reconciliation, and status tracking.

Beyond core platform work, I champion AI-driven engineering: LLM-assisted migrations, AWS Bedrock integrations, Spring AI, MCP tooling, and production automations that eliminate manual ops. I also mentor engineers, lead architecture discussions, and establish engineering practices around scalability, observability, and resiliency.

In my free time I build side projects like DSA Animator — because I genuinely love building things, learning, and sharing knowledge with the community.

GitHub LinkedIn Email

Bhushan Dhapodkar

SDE-III @ Nium

📍 Mumbai, India

SEPA Java 21 AWS Bedrock Spring AI MCP Fintech

Career

Work Experience

Nium

SDE-III · Platform Owner

Jun 2022 — Present Mumbai, India

End-to-end owner of Nium's high-volume SEPA platform — architecture, development, deployment, monitoring, incident management, and 24×7 production support.
Architected scalable payment systems for collections, payouts, settlements, and reconciliation across SEPA, MEPS, RTGS, and multi-country corridors.
Integrated 5+ payment gateways (PG) — end-to-end connections with banking networks, payment processors, and third-party financial institutions across domestic and international corridors.
Architected and built 10+ production microservices with multi-container, scalable architecture using Docker & Kubernetes — designed for high availability and horizontal scale under peak transaction load.
Built event-driven microservices with Spring Boot, RabbitMQ, Apache Camel, Kafka — handling millions of transactions with retries, idempotency, and fault-tolerant workflows.
Designed payment orchestration, routing, and virtual account (VAN) systems to improve success rates and operational resilience.
Led platform modernisation in 2 days using LLM-assisted development (traditionally 10–15 days) — Java 8 → Java 21, RabbitMQ → AWS SQS, Hystrix → Resilience4j, Prometheus observability, and 30+ dependency upgrades with zero downtime.
Shipped Nium's first n8n automation in production — Partner Downtime UI serving 100+ global partners, eliminating manual after-hours scripts.
Drove LLM integration, Spring AI, MCP, and AWS Bedrock capabilities across the platform for intelligent automation and developer productivity.
Established observability — centralized logging, distributed tracing, metrics, alerting, and operational runbooks for rapid incident response.
Mentored engineers, conducted code reviews, and shaped engineering standards for scalability, security, and maintainability.

Java 21Spring Boot 3SEPA Apache Camel 4RabbitMQKafkaAWS BedrockSpring AI MCPn8nDocker Kubernetes

Accion Labs

SDE-II

Sept 2021 — Jun 2022 Bangalore, India

Led development of the Entity Verification system for bank KYC — PAN, Aadhar, Passport, Voter ID validation.
Architected backend services with Spring Boot & Java 8 across Card payment, Gaming, Trading, and Travel domains.
Worked with MongoDB, Graph DB, Redis, Azure in distributed, full-stack scenarios.

Java 8Spring BootMongoDBRedisAzure

TCS

Software Engineer

Jul 2019 — Sept 2021 Nagpur, India

Developed critical backend services for enterprise applications using Java, Spring Boot, and SQL.
Delivered scalable, high-performance solutions across multiple client engagements.

JavaSpring BootSQL

ISRO 🚀

Software Engineer Intern

Jul 2018 — Mar 2019 Nagpur, India

Optimised satellite image processing pipelines using Python with parallel processing — reduced runtime from 16 min → 7 min.

PythonNumPyPandas

Core Work

Platform Engineering

Primary Platform · Highest Traffic at Nium

🇪🇺

SEPA Payment Processing Platform

Single Euro Payments Area · Mission-Critical · End-to-End Ownership

SEPA enables seamless Euro-denominated bank transfers across the European banking network. As the primary owner, I'm accountable for the platform's architecture, reliability, operations, and continuous improvement — ensuring timely, compliant fund movements for customers and banking partners at scale.

What I Own

Full payment lifecycle — initiation → processing → settlement → reconciliation
Service availability, stability, and performance under peak traffic
Production releases, incident response, RCA & postmortems
Monitoring, alerting, runbooks & operational compliance

Technical Depth

Event-driven microservices with async messaging & distributed transactions
Payment orchestration, routing, idempotency & failure recovery
Database optimisation for high-throughput financial workloads
Secure REST APIs & integrations with European banking partners
Multi-container deployment on Docker/Kubernetes for scalable service delivery

Business Impact

One of the highest-traffic payment services within Nium
99.9%+ availability for business-critical payment flows
Reduced ops overhead through automation & process optimisation
Multiple scalability improvements delivered without disruption

SEPAMEPSRTGS Cross-borderReconciliationSettlement Spring BootRabbitMQApache Camel

Other Platform Contributions @ Nium

🏦

Payment Gateway & Payin

Designed and developed the centralised payment engine — transaction orchestration, routing, validation, processing, and reconciliation across multi-country corridors. Integrated 5+ payment gateways with banks, processors, and card networks.

5+ PG Integrated

Multi Corridor

Payment GatewayPayinVAN Direct Debit

💳

Card-Based Collections

Built card payment processing supporting authorization, capture, settlement, refunds, reversals, chargebacks, and end-to-end reconciliation workflows.

Card PaymentsChargebacksSettlement

⚖️

Balance Mismatch Identification

Built a reconciliation service that compares internal ledger balance vs. bank-reported balance. When a mismatch is detected, it automatically traces and surfaces the buggy or anomalous transactions responsible — cutting manual investigation time and reducing financial risk.

🔍 Auto-detects balance discrepancies 🐛 Pinpoints root-cause transactions

ReconciliationBalance AuditRoot Cause Analysis Fintech

⚡

Partner Downtime UI

Nium's first n8n automation in production. Self-service UI for 100+ global payment partners to schedule, pause, and resume downtimes — no more manual weekend scripts.

🌙 Eliminated after-hours manual intervention 🔍 Full auditability & visibility

n8nAutomationInternal Tool

☕

Java 21 Migration

Led full platform modernisation in 2 days using LLM-assisted development — Java 8 → Java 21, RabbitMQ → AWS SQS, Hystrix → Resilience4j, Prometheus observability, and 30+ dependency upgrades — a process that traditionally takes 10–15 working days.

⚡ 10–15 days → 2 days 🔄 RabbitMQ → SQS · Hystrix → Resilience4j 📊 Prometheus observability added

Java 21Spring Boot 3AWS SQS Resilience4jPrometheusLLM-Assisted

Intelligence

AI & Automation

I don't just use AI — I integrate it into production systems. From LLM-powered migrations to intelligent agents and workflow automation, I build AI solutions that deliver measurable business impact.

🧠

LLM Integration & Spring AI

Built intelligent AI assistants and agents using LLMs, tool integrations, APIs, and workflow orchestration. Led Spring AI and MCP implementation across the payment platform.

☁️

AWS Bedrock & Cloud AI

Experienced with AWS Bedrock for model inference, RAG patterns, and cloud-native AI deployments. Comfortable building production AI on AWS infrastructure alongside existing fintech stacks.

🔧

MCP & Developer Tooling

Implemented Model Context Protocol (MCP) servers and integrations — connecting LLMs to internal systems, APIs, and operational data for context-aware automation.

⚙️

Workflow Automation (n8n)

Designed and deployed production automations with n8n — eliminating manual ops, reducing turnaround time, and giving teams self-service control over critical workflows.

🚀

AI-Driven Development

Use Claude, Cursor, and LLM-assisted workflows daily — achieving 5× faster delivery on complex tasks like platform migrations, code modernisation, and test generation.

🤖

AI Agents & Orchestration

Built AI-powered agents for operational tasks — reducing manual intervention in payment processing, reconciliation, and partner management workflows.

💻 Languages & Frameworks

Java 8–21Spring BootSpring AI Hibernate / JPAREST APIMicroservices PythonFlutter

🏗️ Infrastructure & Messaging

RabbitMQApache CamelKafka AWSAzureDocker KubernetesPostgreSQLMongoDB Redis

🤖 AI / LLM Stack

AWS BedrockLLM Integration Spring AIMCP Prompt Engineeringn8n Automation AI AgentsClaude / Cursor RAG

🧠 Practices & Leadership

System DesignArchitectureIncident Management MentoringCode ReviewsObservability Distributed TracingResilience4jSEPA Payments Security & Compliance

Impact

Leadership & Outcomes

Beyond writing code — driving reliability, mentoring teams, and delivering outcomes that matter to the business.

🔗

5+

Payment gateways integrated end-to-end

🏗️

10+

Microservices built with multi-container scalable architecture

🏦

#1 Traffic

SEPA — highest-volume payment service at Nium

⚡

2 Days

Platform modernisation — Java 21, SQS, Resilience4j, Prometheus (normally 10–15 days)

🌍

100+

Global partners served via automation

🛡️

99.9%+

Availability for mission-critical payment flows

👥

Mentor

Engineers on system design, standards & best practices

🎓

2+ Yrs

Teaching experience — a strong foundation for mentoring junior engineers

🛸

ISRO

Satellite image pipeline — 16 min → 7 min

Free Time

Side Projects

I build things in my spare time because I genuinely love creating, learning, and sharing with the community. These aren't work projects — they're passion projects.

Side Project

📊

DSA Animator

An interactive web platform that animates Data Structures & Algorithms visually — built entirely in my free time. Reached 5,000+ users in the first 50 days, helping students and engineers understand DSA through step-by-step visual learning.

5000+ Users

50 Days

HTML/CSS/JSAnimationsEducation

Visit dsaanimator.com →

Ed-Tech · Venture

🎓

Bharat Placed

Built India's first dynamic IT courses platform — course content, interview prep, and job readiness adapt to each learner's experience level (student, fresher, or working professional). Features trending tracks in AWS Developer and Java Spring Boot, a dynamic interview portal, integrated job portal, mock interviews with ratings, and pay-after-switch model.

Dynamic Course Content

100% Job Assistance

🎯 Experience-based learning paths 💼 Own job portal + mock interview system

Ed-TechAWSSpring Boot Job PortalInterview Prep

Visit bharatplaced.com →

Side Project

🔒

LockIn App

A cross-platform productivity app on Google Play Store — Java + Spring Boot backend, helping users stay focused and disciplined.

FlutterJavaSpring Boot Play Store

View on Play Store →

Side Project

🎬

Reels Manager

Cross-platform app with Flutter + Java/Spring Boot backend — built with 95% AI-generated code, showcasing effective human-AI collaboration.

FlutterAI-GeneratedSpring Boot Play Store

View on Play Store →

Startup · 2018

🏆

VBS App

Won Best Startup Award 2018 at Startup Mela. Scaled to 1,00,000+ registered users within 1 year of launch.

🥇 Best Startup Award 2018 🎯 1L+ users in 1 year

View on Softonic →

Beyond Code

Life Outside Work

I'm a chill, easy-going person who genuinely loves what I do — but I'm equally passionate about living fully outside of work. Here's a glimpse of who I am when I'm not building payment platforms.

✈️

Traveler

Love exploring new places, cultures, and cuisines. Every trip is a new story and a fresh perspective.

🎬

Movie Buff

Big fan of cinema — from thrillers to documentaries. Always up for a good film recommendation.

🏏

Cricket

Die-hard cricket lover. Playing, watching, debating stats — cricket is a way of life.

🏸

Badminton

Regular on the court. Badminton keeps me sharp, active, and competitive in the best way.

♟️

Chess

Strategy on the board mirrors strategy in code. Chess is my mental workout.

🃏

Poker

Probability, patience, and reading the table — poker keeps my decision-making sharp under pressure.

🎵

Music

Music is my constant companion — while coding, traveling, or just unwinding after a long day.

⛰️

Mountain Camping

Nothing beats waking up to a mountain sunrise. Camping in the hills is my favourite reset button.

😎

Chill Human

I take my craft seriously, not myself. Always up for good conversation, a spontaneous trip, or a friendly match on the court.

Let's talk

Get in Touch

Open to conversations about fintech platforms, AI engineering, architecture, or just a friendly chat about cricket, travel, or your favourite movie. I'd love to hear from you.

✉️

Email

bhushandhapodkar1997@gmail.com