Ashans
Khadka

Saved more than $300K annually in vendor licensing by replacing the deletion workflow with an in-house API.

A deletion request touches every store that holds customer data. I marked a request complete only after each relevant system confirmed the deletion. The vendor workflow was expensive and put that legal obligation outside our control, so I built the replacement.

New stores and retention rules kept changing the work. I kept the business rules separate from storage, so changing an underlying system did not mean rewriting the core decision.

The rate-limited GDPR/CCPA services now run in every production environment. They process approximately 200K PII-based requests per month while preserving data residency and protecting production performance.

What I'd do differently: I would define, validate, and version the data contract on day one. The first version relied too much on one system's document shape, which made subsequent changes harder to trace and validate.

The MongoDB fleet stopped taking months to upgrade across seven environments.

I led the upgrades from MongoDB 4.4 through 8.0. I treated an upgrade as routine only after the recovery path had been tested, so each change used a maintenance window, a standby-cluster safety net, and a rollback procedure we had already run.

I wrote reusable runbooks and brought teammates into the work. That cut the upgrade cycle from months to weeks without making the process less safe.

The CDC pipeline could look healthy while data was still missing.

A green dashboard was not enough proof that a change event had reached the lakehouse. I added continuous validation between the events and landed data, so we could see whether the path was actually complete.

It caught five issues before they became incidents: schema-driven lakehouse gaps, source-database ingestion delays, MSK throttling, and oversized events rejected by MSK. I presented the result to the wider engineering organization.