Tech Lead & Backend Developer
Leading Air India Express from Integration Design to Go-Live
Owned the technical path for Air India Express across merchant communication, API readiness, linked-order refunds, reconciliation design, mentoring, and launch support.
Details are intentionally generalized to respect confidentiality.
- Timeline
- 2026
- Domain
- Merchant integration, refunds, reconciliation, production readiness
- Impact
- Took a major merchant integration from API alignment to production go-live, including new refund and reconciliation behavior.
Architecture
System boundary map
The diagram preserves the major responsibilities and handoffs while omitting proprietary implementation details.
Air India Express Integration
Led API alignment and rollout while implementing linked-order refunds with newest-child-first allocation and designing reconciliation across gateway files, ticket identifiers, and order relationships.
Context
Large merchant launches are both systems and coordination problems. API behavior, payment state, gateway data, merchant expectations, and rollout decisions must remain aligned under a fixed launch timeline.
Air India Express required new platform behavior rather than configuration alone, making technical ownership central to the integration.
Problem
Refunds against a parent order needed to account for linked child orders and allocate against the latest eligible child first.
Reconciliation also had to connect gateway files with ticket identifiers and parent-child order relationships so operational teams could explain discrepancies.
Constraints
New behavior had to preserve existing refund flows and gateway semantics.
Merchant issues and late production-readiness requests required short feedback cycles.
Reconciliation needed stable identifiers across merchant, platform, and gateway views.
Merchant-specific requirements could not become scattered conditional logic.
My Role
Served as technical lead and primary engineering counterpart for API walkthroughs, requirement clarification, issue triage, production-readiness decisions, and launch follow-through.
Designed the approach, implemented the linked-order refund capability, contributed launch-critical fixes, and guided an intern through assigned integration changes.
Technical Design
Modeled parent and child orders as a refund chain and applied LIFO allocation so the newest eligible child order is refunded first.
Kept allocation and gateway-facing refund behavior explicit so partial and chained refunds remained traceable.
Designed reconciliation mapping across gateway files, ticket identifiers, order identifiers, and linked-order relationships.
Used direct merchant feedback and production telemetry to close integration issues without weakening core platform contracts.
Tradeoffs
Embedding merchant-specific behavior directly in the payment path would have been faster, but a first-class linked-order model kept the capability reusable and auditable.
Supporting late readiness changes increased delivery pressure, so changes were constrained to explicit contracts and verified failure paths.
Impact
Air India Express successfully went live on the integration.
The platform gained linked-order refund behavior and a reconciliation approach that did not exist before the project.
The work combined hands-on backend delivery, merchant-facing technical leadership, and mentorship within one launch.
What I learned
Merchant-facing technical leadership means translating ambiguity into decisions quickly while protecting platform correctness.
Refund and reconciliation design must share the same order model; otherwise financial discrepancies become difficult to explain.