Arsalan Shaik
I make backends behave.
CS student at UT Dallas (graduating Dec 2026), most recently building backend microservices at Staples and data-pipeline services at Intuit. I like the unglamorous parts of software — the API that has to stay under 400ms, the connection pool that leaks at peak traffic, the service that has to not fall over at 3am.
Resume
Work Experience
Software Engineer Intern
Staples
- Built backend microservices in Java and Spring Boot for an internal operations tool used daily by about 200 employees, replacing a manual process that cost the team 15 hours a week.
- Designed 12 REST API endpoints backed by PostgreSQL that validate incoming requests, retry failed calls, and return clear error messages, holding response times under 400 ms in production.
- Traced intermittent failures during peak traffic to database connections that were never returned to the pool, dropping the error rate from 2.1% to under 0.1%.
- Upgraded four services from Spring Boot 2 to Spring Boot 3 with no downtime, fixing 30+ dependency conflicts, and raised automated test coverage from 54% to 86% with JUnit and Mockito.
- Built an admin dashboard in React and TypeScript, packaged it with Docker, and deployed it on Kubernetes so the operations team could check job status and retry failed jobs without asking an engineer.
Software Engineer Intern
Intuit
- Built Python services for a data pipeline that handles about 40 million events a day from Kafka, exposing REST APIs used by four internal teams.
- Wrote a monitoring tool in Python that detects when the pipeline falls behind and recommends how much to scale up, cutting delays during peak hours by 30%.
- Added a Redis caching layer in front of the most-requested endpoints, cutting median response time from 320 ms to 45 ms and reducing database load by about 60%.
- Moved 15+ jobs off company servers to AWS using S3 for storage, Redshift for queries, and Lambda for scheduling, and wrote validation scripts confirming no records were lost.
- Ran the services on Kubernetes and set up dashboards and alerts so the team catches pipeline problems in under 10 minutes instead of hours.
Projects
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Skills
Languages
Backend
Frontend
Databases
Cloud & DevOps
Data & Messaging
Practices
Certifications
PCEP – Certified Entry-Level Python Programmer
Python Institute
Microsoft Certified: Azure Fundamentals (AZ-900)
Microsoft
Microsoft Certified: Azure Data Fundamentals (DP-900)
Microsoft
Recent Events
HackUTD
HackathonNov 2025 · Richardson, TX
Location Discovery Platform
At UT Dallas's flagship 24-hour hackathon, built a location-discovery platform with a team of four that scrapes TikTok and Instagram for trending places, uses AI to interpret natural-language search and generate location descriptions, and runs geospatial search over PostgreSQL/PostGIS.
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