Challenges

Working within a core payments platform means operating under high regulatory, operational, and cross-team constraints. Beyond pure technical refactoring, the initiative required managing schema evolution risks, deployment governance with Operations teams, and ensuring backward compatibility across multiple critical services consuming financial movement data.

Event Contract Migration (Avro to JSON)

• Challenge: Migrating critical financial movement events from Avro-based schemas to JSON without breaking existing producers and consumers across multiple domains.
• Solution: Designed a progressive schema evolution strategy, updated producer and consumer applications incrementally, and validated compatibility through staged deployments and controlled rollout processes.

Kafka Topic Restructuring

• Challenge: Redesigning Kafka topic structure to align with domain boundaries while maintaining system stability in a production banking environment.
• Solution: Coordinated topic configuration changes via centralized infrastructure repositories, adapted consumer logic, and ensured governance alignment before each production deployment.

Cross-Infra Collaboration

• Challenge: Operating across two distinct infrastructure models (GitHub Actions/Azure and Jenkins/Azure) with different ownership and deployment responsibilities.
• Solution: Aligned implementation details across both stacks (NestJS and Spring Boot), documented deployment steps in detail for Operations teams, and ensured reproducible, auditable release processes.

Operational Governance & Deployment Constraints

• Challenge: Limited control over CI/CD pipelines and production execution, requiring strict coordination with Operations and Security teams.
• Solution: Prepared structured deployment documentation, validated artifacts in Artifactory, and coordinated controlled releases executed by Operations while maintaining technical ownership of application behavior.

Producer Library Standardization

• Challenge: Inconsistent event production patterns across services generating financial movement events.
• Solution: Developed a reusable Node.js (Nest-first) event production library to standardize validation, event construction, and publishing logic across producer services.

Results/Conclusion:

Contributed to a foundational re-architecture of financial movements data layer, enabling cleaner domain alignment and long-term maintainability of event-driven flows. Strengthened cross-team technical alignment between product-facing and core banking infrastructures while operating under production-grade deployment governance and operational constraints.