Software Engineer · Kansas City
Sai Lakshmi Kota
I build
that keep business-critical production running.
About
From a small-town computer lab in Andhra Pradesh to building production systems in Kansas City.
I wrote my first lines of code in India, working on web projects with my campus tech society. Turning ideas into working software — and figuring out why it broke — is what got me hooked.
Moving to the United States as an international student to study Computer Science at UMKC meant starting over: a new culture, a new academic system, and learning to ask for help far from home. It taught me to adapt quickly, communicate clearly across backgrounds, and stay calm when things are unfamiliar — skills I now use every day when debugging distributed systems.
Today I build backend services that keep business-critical operations running. I care about the unglamorous parts — uptime, clean APIs, good tests — because that's what lets everyone else do their job.
Get to Know Me
Pick a question — I'll answer.
How I Work
Tap a card to read more.
Skills
Experience
Click a role to see what I did there.
- Designed and maintained Java Spring Boot microservices and REST APIs for business-critical production systems.
- Debugged and optimized distributed services, cutting response times by 35%.
- Deployed and operated services on AWS, Docker and Kubernetes at 99.9% uptime.
- Shipped releases in Agile with automated testing, monitoring and CI/CD pipelines.
- Built client-specific enhancements by customizing modules to stakeholder requirements.
- Integrated third-party APIs, validating request/response flows and resolving integration issues.
- Refactored and tuned legacy codebases, reducing defects and improving stability.
- Authored API guides and deployment notes that shortened onboarding.
- Built a full-stack Expense Management System (JS + PHP/MySQL), improving expense visibility by 40%.
- Designed a multi-tier architecture with validation logic, reducing entry errors by 25%.
- Delivered interactive financial dashboards, speeding decisions by 30%.
- Applied TDD, SSL and RBAC, reducing security vulnerabilities by 35%.
- Built Angular + Express apps scaling to 200+ concurrent users.
- Modeled MongoDB data for event registration, improving retrieval by 40%.
- Created real-time dashboards and chat with WebSockets for hackathons.
- Automated testing and deploys with Jest and Docker, cutting errors by 60%.
Education & Certifications
University of Missouri – Kansas City
B.S. in Computer Science
Dean's List
Master the Coding Interview
Data Structures & Algorithms — Udemy
Beyond Code
Contact
Let's build something reliable.
Open to software engineering roles across the United States.