SDE II at Zeta

Prabal
Kalia

Clearing networks, matching logic, and rule engines — systems that stay correct under load.

View workEnter Starkizard
Athens · ClearingIIIT Kottayam · 9.33India

About

Engineer first.
Builder always.

Software engineer shipping payment clearing and transaction systems at scale. Currently SDE II on Zeta's Athens team — clearing networks, matching logic, and rule engines that have to be correct under load.

Before Zeta I spent time at Media.net on contextual advertising: access control, keyword recommendation, CLIP fine-tuning, and making Jenkins go from painful to boringly fast.

IIIT Kottayam CSE (CGPA 9.33). Competitive programming, hackathons, and building things for fun keep me sharp — online as starkizard.

Find me on GitHub, Codeforces, and LinkedIn.

Experience

Work that has to be right at scale.

  1. Jan 2025 – Present

    SDE II

    Zeta

    Current
    • End-to-end testing on Athens; found critical bugs and shipped improvements.
    • Improved matching logic — cut query time from 30+ minutes to ~1.5 minutes.
    • Delivered clearing features for 3 new transaction types.
    • Spearheaded onboarding the NYCE network into existing clearing.
    • Introduced a Drools rule engine and externalized clearance rules.
    • Awarded Outstanding for 2024–2025.

  2. Jun 2024 – Dec 2024

    SDE I

    Zeta

    • Athens team: DMS transactions and clearing at scale.
    • Helped scale the clearing model toward ~30× transactions per day.
    • Built async Spring Boot + Camunda backends for clearing file state machines.
    • Queried distributed S3 data with AWS Athena.
    • Bugfixes and enhancements impacting ~8.3% of retried transactions.

  3. Jan 2022 – May 2024

    Intern → SDE I

    Media.net

    • Auto-Optimization team for the contextual advertising platform.
    • Account Management tool in Spring Boot — automated formerly manual workflows.
    • Common Access Control Agent in Spring Boot — one gate across tools.
    • Boosted PIR Perform keyword recommendation coverage by ~20% (Python).
    • Cut a Jenkins build from ~16 minutes to ~9 seconds via Dockerfile work (~100×).
    • Article Service APIs (Java Servlets) for AI + manual articles on provider pages.
    • Fine-tuned CLIP for image–text contextual similarity (~96% accuracy).
    • Async Python scripts for load, clean, and cluster datasets.

  4. Jul 2021 – Dec 2021

    DevOps Intern

    IBM Bangalore

    • Testing, development, and automation for IBM Cloud Pak for Network Automation.
    • Python test framework for APIs, Kafka messages, and shell commands on OpenShift — ~5× faster testing.

Projects

Things I've built and broken in.

BetaZero Chess Engine

C++ engine with Alpha-Beta (PVS). Engine credit: 2500+ Lichess.

C++SearchChess

Lichess Visualizer

Visualize and analyze Lichess games via API, python-chess, and BetaZero.

PythonChessData

Karaoke Generator

Generates karaoke and backing tracks from MP3s using source separation (Spleeter).

PythonAudioML

CrudeCode

Browse solutions to problems from popular competitive programming platforms.

CPWeb

Skills

Stack I reach for.

Languages

Python · C++ · Java · JavaScript · SQL · Bash

Backend

Spring Boot · Microservices · Flask · Java Servlets · Camunda · Kafka · RabbitMQ

Infra

Docker · Kubernetes · Git · Jenkins · AWS Athena · S3 · OpenShift

Other

Data Structures · Algorithms · Data Science · Drools · CLIP / ML fine-tuning

Education

Foundations.

  • Indian Institute of Information Technology, Kottayam

    B.Tech, Computer Science and Engineering · CGPA 9.33 / 10

    Aug 2018 – May 2022

  • Ryan International School, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi

    Class 12 — PCM + Computer Science · 91.6%

    Apr 2015 – May 2018

  • Ryan International School, Vasant Kunj, New Delhi

    Class 10 · CGPA 10 / 10

    – May 2018

Achievements

Leaderboards, records, and one Outstanding year.

  • Apr 2021

    World Rank 2

    MLH Local Hack Day

  • 2025

    Outstanding Award

    Zeta, 2024–2025

  • Mar 2021

    AIR 47

    Reply Code Challenge

  • Feb 2021

    AIR 146

    Google Hash Code

  • Jan 2021

    Top 0.03% · AIR 149

    Codathon '21, MANIT Bhopal

  • 2020

    World Rank 3

    HackerEarth January Code Challenge

  • —

    5 CSES world records

    Fastest codes and code-golf

  • Nov 2020

    Codechef IIITK Chapter President

    Leadership

  • Oct 2019

    Winner

    Reverse Coding & Circuits — Dhruva '19, IIIT Kottayam

  • Apr 2019

    AIR 56

    CodeWars, IIIT Kota (onsite finals qualifier)

Contact

Let's talk clearing systems, engines, or scale bugs.

mail2prabalkalia@gmail.comLinkedInGitHub

+91 8130580250