Zawar Ali

Contributed to a Central Bank Digital Currency solution, designing and implementing a certificate store service API (Ktor) to integrate with PKI for certificate storage, retrieval and revocation. Enhanced crypto-SDK with JWT-SVID verification using Nimbus JOSE + JWT and OPA. Mentored a summer intern, and coordinated across six teams to centralise microservices’ root CA management via Kubernetes ConfigMaps, improving security and easing key rotation. Led PKI–Keycloak integration for OIDC token signing and verification, enabling SDK-backed end-user authentication. Delivered authenticated and authorised inter-service communication across 12 applications, handling 5,000+ requests during deployment.

Developed Kotlin crypto-SDK for high-performance signing and verification, including key rotation and client-side hashing, resulting in 200% faster transactions. Designed and deployed PKI (Terraform, AWS, Vault) for secure key propagation and SPIFFE SVID-based authentication. Benchmarked SDK (K6, Ktor) achieving 500ms P90 signing and 1.5ms verification under heavy load (1000+ concurrent users). Improved resilience with resilience4j retries, maintaining 95% uptime in Kubernetes Chaos Mesh tests. Maintained SDK documentation and supported cross-team integration.

Worked on Corda, a distributed ledger platform for financial services: facilitated retrieval of transaction flow logs, enhanced event logging, and enabled custom trace sampling rates via the Corda REST API. Deployed a Docker/Kubernetes-based tracing tool to streamline performance tracking and analysis for the performance team.