Vijay Patil #

Technical Lead & Senior Software Engineer

Bothell, Washington, USA Dombivli, Maharashtra, India English · Hindi · Marathi · Gujarati

Biography #

I am a seasoned software engineer and technical lead with over two decades of experience building enterprise-grade software. My career has taken me from scrappy startups in Mumbai and Bangalore, through a Master’s degree in Software Engineering at the Illinois Institute of Technology in Chicago, to leading engineering efforts on some of the most complex enterprise platforms in the industry.

I specialise in back-end development — distributed systems, API design, and the kind of deep Java work that keeps enterprise software running reliably at scale. Over the years I have also built enough front-end to know what good looks like, and I care deeply about the full user experience, not just what happens on the server.

My most significant work has been at SAP Concur, where I have spent years building and evolving the Expense and Travel platform — a system used by millions of people worldwide. The problems at that scale are genuinely hard: correctness under concurrency, observability in distributed pipelines, performance that holds when the load spikes, and migrations that have to land without downtime. I have lived all of it.

I was born and raised in Mumbai. After two years working in Bangalore I moved to Chicago to earn my Master’s, then settled in the Seattle area, where I have been engineering software for the better part of 17 years. I live in Bothell, WA with my wife Swati and our two children, Arnav and Swati.

I strive to be excellent — at my craft and in my life. I bring energy, rigour, and genuine curiosity to everything I touch. Go straight and turn right has always been the motto.

Experience #

I have 20+ years of experience in the IT industry, with a deep specialisation in Enterprise Application Development on the Java platform. My work spans the full software lifecycle: architecture, design, implementation, testing, deployment, and long-term maintenance of complex, high-availability systems.

Core competencies:

Java & Spring ecosystem — Spring Boot, Spring Cloud, reactive programming, microservices architecture
Distributed systems — event-driven design, message queues (SQS, Kafka), eventual consistency patterns
Data — relational databases (SQL Server, PostgreSQL), NoSQL (MongoDB, DynamoDB, Redis), schema migrations
Cloud & infrastructure — AWS (EC2, Lambda, S3, RDS, CloudFormation), Kubernetes, Docker, CI/CD pipelines
Observability & testing — structured logging (Logstash/MDC/ELK), distributed tracing, Testcontainers, parallel test suites
AI & developer tooling — Claude, MCP toolserver development, agentic workflows, Git worktrees, IntelliJ
Engineering leadership — technical direction, code review culture, cross-team collaboration, mentoring engineers at all levels

Over the course of my career I have moved from writing every line of code myself to knowing when to step back and make the people around me better. I have learned that the best technical decisions are rarely purely technical — they are about tradeoffs, context, and the humans who have to live with the outcome.

I also keep this blog as a journal of engineering practice — working notes on the problems I find interesting, the solutions I have shipped, and the things I wish someone had written down when I was figuring them out.

👉 View my full profile at profile.patilvijayg.com

Interests #

My passion for Java and the Spring ecosystem has never faded — there is always something new to understand deeply. Beyond the day job, I follow the evolution of AI and developer tooling closely; the last few years have genuinely changed how I think about what software engineers will be doing next.

When I am not at a keyboard:

I cook, and I take it seriously
I watch films and keep a running list — mostly world cinema
I love photography, particularly travel photography
I go on long drives whenever I can
I am into biking, swimming, bowling, and jet skiing
Music is always on — eclectic taste, no apologies