Onkar Kulkarni

Java | React | SQL | Angular | Next.js | HTML/CSS | RAG | GCP | AWS

• Responsible for designing and maintaining CI/CD workflows using Docker, automating build, test, and deployment steps to reduce manual effort and speed up release cycles by approximately 50%.
• Defined and enforced standardized deployment and integration protocols to ensure consistency across environments, enabling smoother collaboration between front-end and back-end teams.
• Implemented Test-Driven Development (TDD) practices in Java, writing unit and integration tests as part of feature development and expanding automated regression test coverage, which contributed to a 20% improvement in product reliability.
• Analyzed production issues and recurring test failures to identify root causes, and applied fixes to prevent regressions and improve system stability over time.
• Developed and maintained an Angular-based ERP portal, working closely with product and backend teams to implement features aligned with business requirements.
• Designed and implemented RESTful APIs to support ERP functionality and enable integration for 5+ internal teams, helping reduce dependencies and improve feature delivery speed by approximately 15%.

Python | React | SQL | Angular | Next.js | HTML/CSS | RAG | LangChain | LangGraph | Agentic AI | OpenAPI | Golang | AWS

• Collaborated with PhD faculty to architect an agentic RAG chatbot using LangChain, LangGraph, and Hugging Face, implementing stateful clinical reasoning and multi-agent task delegation for healthcare research and deep AI integration.
• Contributed to the maintenance and improvement of a university-managed cloud platform used by 1,000+ students and staff, helping increase system availability from 96% to 99.4% by refactoring backend services written in Golang and improving service isolation to reduce system-wide failures.
• Assisted in identifying reliability issues in core services by analyzing logs and failure patterns, and implemented targeted fixes to improve error handling and stability in an AWS-hosted environment.
• Improved performance of high-usage data workflows by optimizing SQL queries and adding appropriate database indexes, resulting in an estimated 30% reduction in data-layer latency during peak usage periods. Supported deployment and release activities across multiple student and staff development teams, helping introduce improved web and release practices that led to faster deployment cycles (≈40%) and fewer production issues (~25% reduction).
• Collaborated with university IT staff, faculty advisors, and student developers to test changes in staging environments, document updates, and ensure smooth rollouts with minimal disruption to end users.
• Gained hands-on experience with cloud infrastructure, backend development, and collaborative software development in an academic production environment while balancing coursework and part-time responsibilities.

Java | Spring Boot | React | SQL | Angular | Node.js | HTML/CSS | RAG | AWS | Kubernetes

• Contributed consistently to the design, development, and maintenance of Node.js–based APIs supporting 10,000+ daily transactions, focusing on performance, reliability, and clean code standards in a production environment.
• Took increasing ownership of API performance optimization, improving data-access patterns and query efficiency to help achieve ~99% system uptime and ~35% reduction in request latency.
• Played an active role in modernizing the team’s release process by developing and maintaining Kubernetes-based deployment scripts, enabling zero-downtime deployments and reducing release cycles from two weeks to three days for an 8-person engineering team.
• Designed and implemented batch-processing automation for document extraction workflows, reducing approximately 40 hours of manual effort per week and improving extraction accuracy by ~25% through validation logic and error handling.
• Collaborated closely with senior engineers over an extended period, participating in code reviews, testing, and deployment activities, and progressively taking on more complex tasks as trust and experience grew.
• Balanced ongoing academic responsibilities with long-term engineering contributions, gaining deep exposure to backend systems, container orchestration, CI/CD, and production operations.