Adobe is where I grew from "give me a ticket" to "give me the module." I started writing backend services on Java, Spring Boot, MySQL, and Kafka behind Experience Cloud, and over two years ended up owning whole pieces of it end to end. I designed the event-driven flows on Kafka and Redis that kept content, analytics, and customer activity in sync across enterprise apps, wrote the REST APIs that tied Adobe products to the outside world, and made deployments boring (in the good way) with Docker, Kubernetes, and GitHub Actions. It taught me that owning something means caring about it after it ships.

Capital One was my first real taste of money moving through code, and it made me serious about getting things right. I built backend services on Java, Spring Boot, MySQL, and PostgreSQL for credit-card servicing, account management, and transaction processing, where a rounding error isn't a bug, it's someone's bank statement. I worked on the Kafka event-driven systems watching transactions, tuned the slow paths with SQL and Redis, locked the APIs down with Spring Security, OAuth2, and JWT, and even built the React and Redux dashboards the servicing teams lived in. This is where distributed systems stopped being a textbook chapter for me.