Tokyo, Japan · Open to meaningful conversations

Ashok Murthy

Senior Staff Application Engineer

I build and evolve software platforms that teams can trust at scale.

Hands-on technical leadership across payments, enterprise platforms, and AI-enabled products. I help teams turn complex systems into clear architectures, dependable services, and products they can keep improving.

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Portrait of Ashok Murthy
Engineering with perspective.
13+years building software
1M+monthly transactions
99.9%integration uptime
40%faster onboarding

Selected work

Engineering outcomes that last.

A few examples of turning complex technical challenges into systems teams can operate and grow.

01PLATFORM MODERNIZATION

Making a payment platform easier to evolve

Helped reshape a large-scale SaaS payment platform into four production services—API, payments, jobs, and batch—while supporting live cross-region traffic.

40% faster engineer onboarding

  • Service boundaries
  • Platform architecture
  • Cross-region systems
02PAYMENT INTEGRATIONS

Connecting core payments to card networks

Designed the integration layers between the payment engine and Visa and Mastercard networks using ISO8583, with a focus on dependable transaction flows and clear service contracts.

99.9% uptime · 1M+ monthly transactions

  • ISO8583
  • Visa & Mastercard
  • Reliability
03AI SAAS · ARCHITECTURE MODERNIZATION

Re-architecting a growing platform around clear service ownership

I recently completed the target architecture for an AI-enabled SaaS platform, defining how services own data, communicate, and connect to a unified tenant experience.

Architecture design complete

The challenge

The platform had grown to 15 tightly coupled services with mixed API and event patterns, cross-service database access, and one deployment pipeline shared across the services. Ownership and the impact of change were difficult to reason about.

The architecture

  • Defined each microservice as owner of its data, replacing direct cross-service database access in the target architecture.
  • Defined REST as the service-to-service pattern for synchronous calls, with events for asynchronous updates.
  • The platform backend validates Firebase tokens; the platform frontend routes each tenant to the appropriate product UI.

The target design makes service and data ownership explicit, establishes clear communication patterns, and gives tenants one consistent route into their product experience. Rollout results will be added when they can be measured.

Career

Experience

Senior Staff Application Engineer

Apr 2026 – Present

Trust Co. Ltd. — Tokyo, Japan

  • Serves as tech lead, driving system architecture and critical design decisions across two core products.
  • Leads engineering for an enterprise SaaS product built on foundational LLMs.
  • Directed load-testing strategy to surface bottlenecks and optimize latency under high-concurrency LLM workloads.
  • Architected the unification of fragmented product interfaces into a single, cohesive UI, improving both user experience and maintainability.

Senior Software Engineer & Team Lead

Jun 2022 – Mar 2026

Episode Six — Tokyo, Japan

  • Refactored a large-scale monolithic SaaS payment platform into a single repo with four production services — api, payments, jobs, and batch — handling live cross-region traffic, cutting engineer onboarding time by 40%.
  • Designed the HLD/LLD for integration layers between the core payment engine and VISA/Mastercard ISO8583 networks, sustaining 99.9% uptime across 1M+ monthly transactions.
  • Led migration to containerized deployments on AWS EKS, adding health checks, rolling updates, and auto-healing for improved fault tolerance.
  • Built an observability stack — CloudWatch, structured logging, distributed tracing — that cut incident-resolution time by 40%.

A little about me

Complex systems. Clear direction.

I’m a software engineer based in Tokyo with 13 years of experience building enterprise and payment systems. I began my career in India and have worked with teams at Rakuten, PayPal, Episode Six, and Trust Co. Ltd.

My work spans payment-network integrations, platform modernization, cloud deployment, observability, and AI-enabled SaaS. I enjoy shaping architecture and technical direction while staying close to implementation and production behavior.

01

Make boundaries clear

Define domains and service contracts that let systems and teams evolve with less friction.

02

Design for production

Build reliability, observability, and safe delivery into the architecture from the start.

03

Stay close to the work

Bring architectural decisions back to implementation details, team needs, and user outcomes.