Senior Lead - Application Development (AePS, IMPS & NETC)

NPCI is evolving the National Electronic Toll Collection (NETC) FASTag ecosystem into a next-generation, real-time, intelligent, and scalable national tolling and mobility platform. This role is responsible for architecting, building, and scaling stream‑processing and platform capabilities that operate at national scale across toll plazas, acquirer and issuer banks, and concessionaires — handling mission-critical financial transactions and meeting stringent regulatory, audit, and resilience standards mandated by NPCI, NHAI/IHMCL, and RBI.

The role combines: Low-latency Java-based stream processing for toll transactions Production-grade distributed systems for tag, vehicle, and transaction processing Fraud, image (ANPR/VRN), and decision intelligence (rules-driven, with AI/ML as an added advantage) Platform-level engineering excellence. This is a strategic engineering role (not a pure research or support role).

Strategic Outcomes Expected

• The individual will directly contribute to: Increased straight-through processing (STP) for FASTag toll transactions Reduced manual intervention, charge-back disputes, and exception handling Early and accurate identification of tag cloning, blacklisted tags, VRN/TID mismatches, and fraud rings Improved transaction turnaround time (TAT), settlement accuracy, and system throughput at peak plaza volumes Long-term IP ownership of core platform capabilities within NPCI for the NETC ecosystem Key Responsibilities

1. Real-Time Stream Processing Architecture (Java-Centric) Design and implement event-driven, stream-processing pipelines for NETC FASTag transaction, mapper, and settlement workflows Build low-latency, high-throughput systems using Java-based streaming frameworks such as Apache Kafka / Kafka Streams, Apache Flink, or Spark Structured Streaming Ensure exactly-once processing, idempotency, and fault tolerance across acquirer–NPCI–issuer hops Handle large-scale streams of toll read events, ANPR images, tag metadata, and clearing/settlement files with predictable latency
2. Decision Intelligence & Exception Handling Design and build rules-driven and data-driven decisioning components for: ANPR / Vehicle Registration Number (VRN) validation against tag-vehicle mapping Tag class / vehicle class mismatch detection Fraud and anomaly detection (tag cloning, duplicate reads, ghost transactions, plaza-level anomalies) Intelligent exception and dispute prioritization for charge-back (CCH) and dispute management workflows Collaborate with data science / analytics teams to operationalize models where applicable, ensuring smooth integration into the streaming platform
3. Adoption of Emerging Technology Trends (Applied, Not Experimental) Hybrid decisioning (Rules + Analytics + optional ML/GenAI) for transparent toll decisioning and dispute adjudication Explainability and traceability to support charge-back resolution, member bank queries, and regulatory audits Adaptive rule engines that evolve with new fraud patterns, plaza layouts, and vehicle classes Lightweight Generative AI use cases (exploratory) — assisted dispute summaries, root-cause explanations, smart analyst support Governance frameworks for ethical, compliant usage of any automation aligned with NPCI and RBI expectations Emphasis is on controlled, auditable, deterministic systems — critical given the multi-party (acquirer/issuer/concessionaire) settlement nature of NETC.
4. Platform Integration & Reliability Engineering Integrate streaming and decisioning components into NETC core switching, mapper, clearing, and settlement systems Design for high availability, resilience, and disaster recovery across active-active data centres Optimize performance under peak national toll volumes (festival/holiday surges, 24×7 plaza operations) Ensure observability (metrics, logs, traces) for NPCI ops, member banks, and plaza operators
5. Security, Compliance & Audit Readiness Ensure solutions comply with RBI, NHAI / IHMCL, MoRTH regulatory expectations and NPCI security and data governance standards Build explainability, traceability, and audit hooks into automated transaction and fraud decisions Support internal, external, and regulator audits with clear technical documentation and decision trails
6. Technical Leadership & IP Ownership Act as a technical authority for stream processing and platform engineering within the NETC FASTag platform Mentor junior engineers and drive engineering best practices across the NETC pod Evaluate and govern vendor / OEM solutions (ANPR engines, fraud tools) without creating dependency Ensure core architecture and platform knowledge remains within NPCI. Required Qualifications & Experience 10–15+ years of experience in enterprise-grade, mission-critical system development Proven track record of architecting and delivering high-volume, low-latency, distributed systems in payments, switching, banking, or tolling/mobility domains. Demonstrated experience leading platform-level engineering initiatives end-to-end (design → production → scale). Required Technical Skills Programming & Frameworks Programming & Frameworks Java (Java 11/17+) with strong understanding of: JVM Internals Garbage Collection (GC) Tuning Multithreading & Concurrency Spring Ecosystem: Spring Boot Spring Cloud Spring Web. Flux (Reactive Programming) Reactive & Asynchronous Programming: Project Reactor Rx. Java API Development: RESTful APIs gRPC Protocol Buffers JSON/Avro Serialization Stream Processing & Messaging Apache Kafka Kafka Streams KRaft Mode Schema Registry Apache Flink and/or Spark Structured Streaming Event-Driven Architecture CQRS (Command Query Responsibility Segregation) Event Sourcing Stateful Stream Processing Exactly-Once Processing Semantics Idempotency Back-Pressure Handling Data & Storage NoSQL Databases: Cassandra Redis Couchbase Equivalent large-scale NoSQL platforms Strong SQL expertise in: PostgreSQL Oracle Database Optimization: Partitioning Sharding Indexing Strategies Data Modeling for: High-Write Systems Low-Latency OLTP Workloads Object Storage: Amazon S3 MinIO Image and File Archival Solutions Distributed Systems & Architecture Microservices Architecture Service Mesh Technologies: Istio Linkerd API Gateway Implementations Distributed Systems Concepts: CAP Theorem Consensus Algorithms (Raft/Paxos) Distributed Transactions Saga Patterns High Availability & Disaster Recovery: Active-Active Deployments Multi-Data Center Architectures Performance Engineering: Capacity Planning Load Testing TPS Optimization at National Scale DevOps, Cloud-Native & Observability Containerization & Orchestration: Docker Kubernetes Helm Linux System Administration CI/CD Tools: Jenkins GitLab CI Azure DevOps Source Control & Git Workflows Infrastructure as Code (IaC): Terraform Ansible Monitoring & Observability: Prometheus Grafana ELK Stack / Open. Search Jaeger Open. Telemetry Security & Compliance Security Protocols: TLS / mTLS HSM Integration Key Management Tokenization Secure Coding: OWASP Standards Vulnerability Assessment & Remediation Regulatory & Compliance Knowledge: PCI-DSS RBI Cybersecurity Guidelines Audit Trail Design Good-to-Have Skills (Preferred) Rules & Decision Engines Drools Easy Rules Equivalent Decision Orchestration Frameworks AI/ML & Productionization Python-based ML Frameworks: Scikit-learn Py. Torch Tensor. Flow ONNX MLflow Computer Vision & OCR OpenCV Tesseract OCR Commercial ANPR SDKs Automatic Number Plate Recognition (ANPR) Technologies MLOps Kubeflow MLflow Model Versioning Model Drift Detection GenAI & LLM Integration Lang. Chain Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Prompt Engineering Domain Expertise NETC / FASTag Ecosystem NHAI / IHMCL Systems RFID Technologies IoT-Based Platforms Payments Switching ISO 8583 ISO 20022 Standards