Shashishekhar Prasad

Staff Software Engineer · 21+ Years in Enterprise Software

Results-driven engineer building mobile, backend, and cloud-native systems at enterprise scale. I lead engineering for high-traffic, associate-facing retail applications — owning full product lifecycles from architecture through production. I mentor engineers, align technical roadmaps with business strategy, and deliver complex distributed systems with quality and scale.

✉️ eshashishekhar@gmail.com LinkedIn 📍 Bentonville, AR

About

I've spent two decades building software that runs where it matters most — on the retail floor, in the hands of frontline associates, and inside the systems that keep checkout lines moving. My work spans embedded POS hardware integration, mobile apps, and high-throughput distributed backends, and over the last several years I've focused on architecting real-time, event-driven systems that operate reliably at national retail scale — across thousands of stores and hundreds of thousands of devices.

I care about clear architecture, auditable process design, and building systems that are easy for the next engineer to reason about. I regularly present technical strategy to senior engineering leadership and enjoy mentoring engineers as they grow into architecture and ownership roles.

Skills

Languages

KotlinJava GoJavaScript C / C++

Backend & Cloud

MicroservicesREST APIs WebSocket ServersKafka ActiveMQRedis Cosmos DBDocker Kubernetes

CI/CD & DevOps

Enterprise CI/CD PipelinesSonarQube SnykGit / GitHub

Workflow & Data

Camunda BPMNBigQuery Draw.io

Practices

Agile / ScrumTechnical Architecture Code ReviewUnit Testing Mentorship

Experience

Staff Software Engineer

July 2019 – Present
Fortune 1 Retailer · Bentonville, AR
  • Lead engineering for associate-facing retail applications that give front-line store leads real-time oversight and rapid resolution of self-checkout alerts, directly improving checkout throughput nationwide.
  • Architected and deployed scalable cloud-native microservices on the company's internal Kubernetes-based cloud platform, using Kafka event streaming and Cosmos DB — engineered for high availability and horizontal scale across thousands of store workloads.
  • Drove full-stack feature development in Kotlin/Android and React Native, optimizing client-server communication and delivering performant, accessible UI aligned with product and UX vision.
  • Replaced ad-hoc logic with auditable Camunda BPMN process flows for associate task management and transaction exception handling.
  • Built and maintained CI/CD pipelines with SonarQube and Snyk quality gates, enforcing code coverage thresholds and preventing security vulnerabilities from reaching production.
  • Own technical architecture for the team — define system design standards, produce architecture diagrams, author architecture decision records, and present technical strategy to engineering leadership, including Distinguished Architects, Directors, and VPs.
  • Engineered a high-throughput WebSocket Server backend designed to sustain 250,000 concurrent persistent connections, enabling real-time bidirectional communication across store associate devices — a foundational capability for low-latency, event-driven retail systems. (Feb 2025 – Present)
  • Built internal event-routing services to intelligently route, buffer, and manage real-time signals across distributed microservices, decoupling event producers from consumers and improving reliability.
  • Integrated message-queuing and caching layers alongside Kafka for reliable asynchronous delivery and durable event queuing in a hybrid messaging architecture balancing throughput with guaranteed delivery.

Senior Software Engineer

Dec 2016 – July 2019
Kitestring — Technical Consulting Services · Bentonville, AR
  • Designed and implemented controller applications for Toshiba 4690 OS and Terminal Sales Application (TSA) in C/C++, enabling bidirectional event communication between in-store lane hardware and associate-facing apps for real-time alert management.
  • Built a Handheld Scan & Go mobile application using Cordova, AngularJS, and JavaScript, deployed on Zebra MC18 devices for in-aisle associate use.
  • Developed REST API services in Go and React Native mobile applications, modernizing point-of-sale associate tooling and improving operational efficiency.

Advisory System Analyst

Jan 2012 – Nov 2016
IBM India · Bentonville, AR
  • Relocated to the United States to support IBM's Walmart account — the beginning of a continuous run of work on Walmart's retail systems that led to a direct role with Walmart in 2019.
  • Developed a Mobile POS application on Motorola MC40 using AngularJS, HTML5, CSS3, and C++, enabling cashiers to process all tender types without a fixed register — deployed as a line-buster to reduce customer wait times.
  • Delivered A4 invoice printing at POS registers using C, C++, XML, and IBM 4690, eliminating thermal receipts for high-volume sales transactions.
  • Engineered a replaceable-device driver framework enabling plug-and-play integration of new POS hardware without modifying the core POS application or OS, accelerating device onboarding across countries and business partners.

IT Consultant

Jan 2005 – Jan 2012
Logica India Pvt Ltd · India
  • Led a five-person engineering team building ProductWriter®, a 60+ application GUI toolset for the UK/Ireland insurance industry (Polaris), enabling product managers to author insurance products, schemes, and dictionaries without developer involvement. Built in C, C++, VC++, and VB6 with ~70 COM DLL components and a DB2 backend.
  • Architected the Run Time Environment (RTE) — Polaris's core rating and quoting engine — as a cross-platform C/C++ library supporting Windows, Linux, Solaris, SCO, and AIX, providing a robust API for premium quotation generation with single- and multi-threading support. This engine underpinned rating for roughly two-thirds of the UK general insurance market.

Recognition & Highlights

Award · 2024 & 2025

Bravo Award — Engineering Excellence

Received twice — October 2024 and again in 2025. Company-wide recognition from the Global Chief Technology Officer & Chief Development Officer for going above and beyond in engineering delivery.

Award · 2020

Making the Difference Award (MADA)

Company-wide recognition for individual contributions that went above and beyond in delivering impact for the business.

Architecture

Enterprise-Scale WebSocket Architecture

Authored the high-level design for a cloud WebSocket server built to support 250,000 concurrent connections, and presented the architecture directly to a Distinguished Architect, Directors, and a VP — reconciling feedback on ordering guarantees and messaging backplane trade-offs.

Cross-Org Leadership

Chain-Wide Resilience Initiative

Drove requirements and architecture alignment across multiple engineering organizations for a resilience initiative spanning roughly 250,000 store checkout lanes, with explicit latency and availability SLAs — keeping a cross-org program on schedule through weekly leadership reviews.

Standards

Reusable Telemetry & Messaging Patterns

Established telemetry schema and channel-naming standards adopted as a reusable pattern for real-time store messaging, reducing future integration cost and accelerating adoption across teams.

Patents

Patent Pending · USPTO · Application Published Mar 2024

Systems and Methods for Third-Party Shopper Exit Verification

Co-inventor on a patent application (assignee: Walmart Apollo, LLC) describing a retail system that verifies third-party personal shoppers as they exit a store after fulfilling a delivery order. The system tracks shopper progress via a mobile app, checks in through a self-checkout kiosk, and dynamically decides — based on account history and order value — whether to grant an automatic digital exit pass or flag the order for an in-person cart audit, balancing loss prevention with a low-friction checkout-free exit experience.

View on Google Patents →

Education

Bachelor of Information Technology

Manipal Academy of Higher Education · Manipal, Karnataka, India