Arjun Verma
Verified Expert in Engineering
Apache Kafka Developer
Gurugram, Haryana, India
Toptal member since September 4, 2025
Built systems handling millions in transactions. At PayU: 500x TPS increase in Rust (30→15,000/host). At Urban Company: cut chat latency from 300ms to <75ms, lifting adoption 32%→47%. Specialties: high-scale back ends, payments, and real-time platforms. Stack: Rust, Rails, Node.js, AWS, Kafka. Seeking: back-end architecture, payment systems, or scaling challenges.
Portfolio
Experience
- Apache Kafka - 10 years
- Ruby On Rails 5/6/7/8 - 10 years
- Amazon Web Services (AWS) - 8 years
- Microservices - 7 years
- Engineering Management - 5 years
- Rust - 4 years
- Artificial Intelligence (AI) - 3 years
- AI Agents - 1 year
Preferred Environment
Slack
The most amazing...
...thing I'm most proud of was redesigning PayU's transaction cycle in Rust, achieving a 500x performance boost from 30 to 15,000 TPS per host.
Work Experience
Head Of Engineering
Self-employed
- Scaled the company's revenue from $0 to $100,000 annually while maintaining a lean team size under 10 people. Established partnerships with Now Delivery, Borzo India, FableStreet, Q2Pay, and RushSports.
- Implemented code generators integrated with GPT-engineer and automated a 2-level code review process before human intervention. Automated incident resolution for 20% of the most critical system errors.
- Expanded value proposition from software development to full-stack productising, designing, development, and customer feedback gathering. Created and scaled both FOSS and SaaS business verticals.
Lead Software Engineer
Urban Company
- Redesigned and rewrote chat service, Ejabberd infrastructure, and chat React SDK, achieving 99.999% latency reduction from 300ms to under 75ms, directly increasing customer-partner chat adoption from 32% to 47%.
- Migrated 100% of CRM agents from phone calls to chat-based support, reducing per-issue resolution costs from Rs 55 to Rs 37 while maintaining service quality and customer satisfaction.
- Led complete communication platform overhaul, including real-time messaging architecture, WebSocket optimisation, and mobile SDK improvements, resulting in measurable business impact across customer experience metrics.
Lead Software Engineer | RnD Platform Head
PayU India
- Redesigned transaction cycle in Rust, achieving 500x TPS increase from 30 to 15,000 per host. Led Service Starter Kit development, migrating 40% of microservices in four months, reducing shipping cycles from 23 to 9 days.
- Designed an Enterprise Service Bus, reducing HTTP API dependency by 90% and onboarding 14/32 services in six months. Built a payment gateway config engine, transferring integration tasks from developers to PMs, cutting the developer queue by 40%.
- Implemented Chargeback service from scratch, scaling to 2,500 RPS with 450ms latency using three hosts. Developed a static risk engine, reducing fraudulent merchant onboarding by 13% and optimising data migration to 2 million records per minute.
Experience
Fashion Supply Chain Management System
https://stream.arjunverma.in/CHALLENGE 1
• Complex Multi-team Workflow Orchestration
• Problem: Coordinating 15+ different workflow types across internal teams and external fabricators with varying capabilities
• Solution: Built a flexible workflow engine supporting dynamic task assignment, priority management, and real-time status tracking across seven fabricator workflow types.
CHALLENGE 2
• Real-time Production Visibility
• Problem: Management needed live visibility into production bottlenecks and team performance.
• Solution: Implemented eight specialized dashboards with real-time updates using Turbo Streams, providing instant insights into production stages and team efficiency.
CHALLENGE 3
• Inventory and Order Fulfillment Complexity
• Problem: Managing virtual inventory across multiple product sizes while handling single and bulk orders (1,000+ items)
• Solution: Developed a sophisticated virtual inventory system with automatic fulfilment logic, supporting different garment sizes and real-time quantity tracking.
Education
Bachelor's Degree in Computer Engineering
Vellore Institute of Technology - Vellore, India
Certifications
Hugging Face AI Agents Course
Hugging Face
Skills
Libraries/APIs
Sidekiq, Node.js, React
Tools
Git, Slack, Redash
Languages
Ruby, Python, Rust, Snowflake
Paradigms
Agile Software Development, Microservices, Event-driven Design (EDD), ETL
Platforms
Apache Kafka, Amazon Web Services (AWS)
Storage
Redis, JSON, PostgreSQL, Elasticsearch
Other
Engineering Management, Tailwind UI, Data Analysis, Ruby On Rails 5/6/7/8, Large-scale Distributed Systems, Ejabberd, XMPP, Chatbots, AI Translation, WebSockets, OpenAI GPT-4 API, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Vite, AI Agents, AI Voice Agents, Data Engineering, Analytics, B.Tech. Computer Science Engineering
How to Work with Toptal
Toptal matches you directly with global industry experts from our network in hours—not weeks or months.
Share your needs
Choose your talent
Start your risk-free talent trial
Top talent is in high demand.
Start hiring