Nikhil Urkude

About

Full-stack engineer with deep experience building enterprise compliance and certification systems at Paycom, including complex approval workflows, live migrations, and large-scale assignment processing. Particularly strong at turning ambiguous business rules into reliable backend workflow logic and at designing trustworthy GraphQL/AI-assisted user experiences backed by real-time system data.

Key Strengths

• End-to-end ownership of full-stack enterprise workflow features
• Strong backend workflow and state-model design
• Translating ambiguous business rules into deterministic system behavior
• Safe live migration and phased rollout for active enterprise clients
• GraphQL-based data orchestration across multiple backend domains
• User-trust-focused AI assistant design with explainable real-time data
• Scalable distributed processing design using Kafka
• Idempotency and failure-recovery design for high-volume jobs
• Performance optimization for large-scale batch assignment processing
• Operational visibility improvements through structured logging and progress tracking
• Owned end-to-end redesign of a core certification approval workflow engine in production
• Safely executed live schema + data migration using feature flags and controlled background jobs
• Improved workflow completion time by 40% and reduced client support escalations
• Strong product/engineering alignment on ambiguous edge-case requirements (and/or logic, inactive approvers, multi-approver scenarios)
• Performance tuning via query refactoring and indexing (reduced API latency from ~20s to <6s)
• Pragmatic architecture tradeoffs to reduce rollout/rollback risk (denormalized 3-approver fields vs normalized unlimited approvers)
• Designed/operated event-driven workflows with contract-based schema evolution and handling late/duplicate events
• Built observability practices with multi-layer logging and Splunk monitoring

Experience

Education

Skills

Languages