Dipankar Banik, engineer.

A decade building the returns platform behind hundreds of retail brands.

I have spent the past decade designing, building, and scaling Narvar's Returns platform, the backend system that powers return experiences for hundreds of leading retail brands.

My work has focused on building reliable, cloud-native services that simplify complex post-purchase workflows across carrier integrations, retailer systems, payment flows, customer notifications, shipment compliance, rules engines, and analytics pipelines. The platform is built primarily on Java-based microservices running across Google Cloud and AWS, with services designed to scale on demand and support high-volume return operations.

At Narvar, I have led backend engineering for major initiatives including Returns V2, Sales Assist, Boxless Returns, and Simple Returns. I have worked on carrier webhook ingestion, shipment reconciliation, asynchronous notification pipelines, feature-flagged rollouts, PII encryption using Google Tink, and configurable return eligibility rules powered by Drools and a custom DSL.

A major part of my work has been modernizing legacy flows into reusable platform capabilities: replacing carrier-specific custom code with unified integration patterns, moving business logic into configuration-driven rules, standardizing data contracts with Avro and Protobuf, and improving reliability through observability, dead-letter handling, and safe dark-mode deployments.

I have also contributed to infrastructure and data platform improvements across multi-cloud environments, helping keep services consistent across AWS VPCs and GCP clusters while supporting scalable analytics through BigQuery.

That modernization extended to the runtime itself: decomposing VM-based services into containerized, stateless microservices on Kubernetes following twelve-factor principles — environment-based configuration, Vault-injected secrets, health and readiness probes, and dev/prod parity — delivered through Ansible, Packer, Helm, and ArgoCD GitOps. Alongside it, an observability-first culture: RED-metric dashboards, SLIs and SLOs with burn-rate alerting, and structured JSON logging, so no service ships without health endpoints and metrics.

The work spans the full stack, too — the React consumer returns UI, the retailer admin portal, and a TypeScript GraphQL API layer (Apollo Server on Node.js) that surfaces platform data to internal operational teams.

The goal throughout: distributed systems that operate reliably at scale, so retailers can offer their customers a smooth, predictable returns experience. More recently, I have built deterministic AI for fraud detection — combining Drools rules-based signal evaluation with agentic LLM workflows (MCP, RAG, vector databases) to produce auditable, repeatable fraud decisions across retailer traffic — and designed AI workflows for the Customer Data Platform (CDP), unifying customer profile and event data across the post-purchase lifecycle with rules-driven guardrails around LLM outputs.

Migrating Gilead's Product Quality System to a globally-deployed J2EE platform.

The PQS is the software backbone of Gilead's drug-quality lifecycle, from clinical API through commercial DP. I architected the full migration off legacy .NET to a Liferay-based J2EE platform, designing the JSR-286 portlet runtime, the Spring/Hibernate service framework, and the LDAP authentication hooks that bind it all together.

FDA-validated. Globally deployed. Foster City, San Dimas, Oceanside, and Edmonton, every PDM business unit on the platform runs through it daily.

Unifying support across Cisco.com with a Salesforce-backed customer portal.

Led the GTMS uCRM initiative, a customer-focused collaboration platform on WebSphere Portal 6.1 that gave both internal and external users a single point of entry for case management. The backbone integrated Salesforce.com as the case engine for products and services, bridged through a custom WSRP catalog and JSR-286 portlet aggregation.

The work spanned high-level architecture, the SFDC integration component, offshore coordination, and tuning the live portlet performance with Charles.

Shipping the UBT Tracker, Kaiser's HR backbone for Unit Based Teams.

Owned the design and engineering of Kaiser's internal HR platform: team creation, role assignment, performance goals, feedback loops, and labor-contract management. End-to-end ERD design, JSR-168/286 portlets on WebSphere 6, SSO with Oracle Access Manager, and ETL pulling from DB2 mainframes via Spring Batch + Quartz.

Hierarchical reporting at any organizational depth. Web 2.0 patterns where they made sense, REST/SOAP services where they didn't.

An extensible portal framework for MLB's Financial Desktop.

Designed MLB's Financial Desktop, a portal framework that abstracted retrieval across content, document, database, and physical-file repositories into a single client-facing surface. Led a six-engineer team on a Struts 2.0 / WebSphere Portal 6.1 build, with TDD via EasyMock + JUnit and full agile cadence.

Reusable Content Service Wrapper API let consumers query any repository without caring about its underlying transport, a pattern I've reused in three other engagements since.

Tech-leading Marsh's global client portal with a 10-person team.

MarshConnect is Marsh's flagship client portal, risk intelligence, claims data, and transactional workflow for the world's largest insurance broker. I led a ten-engineer team across architecture, sizing, content frameworks, and SOAP/XML claims web services backed by Hibernate and Spring JDBC.

Mentored the offshore team on the WebSphere Portal 6.0 nuances most teams learn the hard way; my advisory role on RUP-driven analysis shaped how the broader org tackled portal builds for years after.