# Ankit Tandon **SDE-III @ Tesco | 18+ Years in Software Engineering | Distributed Systems, Architecture, AI & Career Mentoring** I’m a software engineering leader with 18+ years of experience building and scaling enterprise systems, leading complex engineering initiatives, and solving real-world problems across distributed systems, microservices, cloud, data platforms, and AI. I currently work as an **SDE-III at Tesco**, where I work on large-scale engineering systems and technical initiatives involving distributed architectures, Java, Spring Boot, Kafka, Azure, Kubernetes, PostgreSQL and AI-driven solutions. ## What I Can Help You With **Career Growth & Technical Leadership** Thinking about your next career move? I can help you navigate the transition from Senior Engineer to Lead, Staff or Principal Engineer, identify gaps in your current profile, and create a practical growth strategy. **System Design & Distributed Systems** Get practical guidance on designing scalable, reliable distributed systems, including microservices, Kafka, event-driven architectures, APIs, databases, caching, observability and cloud architecture. **System Design Interview Preparation** Preparing for Senior/Staff/Principal-level interviews? I can conduct mock system-design interviews, challenge your design decisions, and provide detailed feedback on architecture, scalability, reliability and communication. **Resume & LinkedIn Review** I can review your resume or LinkedIn profile from the perspective of an experienced engineering interviewer and help you position your experience for senior technical roles. **AI for Software Engineers** Want to understand how to practically apply GenAI/LLMs to software engineering? I can help you identify meaningful AI use cases, understand RAG, embeddings, vector databases and AI agents, and integrate them into enterprise applications. **Engineering & Architecture Mentoring** If you're facing a difficult architecture decision, technical challenge or engineering leadership problem, we can discuss the situation and work through practical options together. ## Why Work With Me? I believe good mentoring should be **practical, honest and actionable**. Over 18+ years in software engineering, I've worked through the evolution from traditional enterprise applications to cloud-native distributed systems and now AI-powered engineering. I've dealt with real-world engineering challenges involving scalability, reliability, performance, architecture, technical debt, production issues, cross-team collaboration and technical leadership. My goal isn't to give you generic career advice or textbook architecture diagrams. I'll help you understand **what actually works in real engineering environments, why it works, and how you can apply it to your own situation.** Whether you're preparing for your next interview, trying to become a better system designer, planning your transition into Staff/Principal engineering, or simply looking for an experienced engineer to challenge your thinking, let's connect. **Book a 1:1 session and let's work through your specific problem together.**