Minal Kulkarni

Project: Expedia Mobile App Growth & Retention.

Designed app growth and retention features that can boost app installs and user app engagement. Incentive campaigns, In-appsharing of properties, flights, activities , Refer a friend, Incentive campaigns.

Role:

• Partnered closely with product management to understand business requirements, translating them into technical specifications that met stakeholder expectations fully.
• Drove the design and delivery of various mobile features like incentivizing app download users, refer-a-friend, app sharing campaigns.
• Collaborated with product & engineering closely on finalizing campaign launching strategies on production with TPM, backend & native app teams.
• Assessed and communicated pros and cons of technical approaches, aligning stakeholders on the optimal path forward.
• Mentored junior developers by providing guidance on best practices, coding techniques, and problem-solving skills.
• Collaborated on stages of systems development lifecycle from requirement gathering to production releases.
• Designed scalable architecture for applications to easily accommodate future growth in user base or functionality expansion.
• Setting up Datadog dashboards/logs/alerts as a part of each initiative.

Project: Expedia Mobile App Downloads. Mobile app download squad designs various banners for brand expedia like app-download, Travel advisory & surface them on expedia web & Mobile web and expedia mobile app for all point of sales and lines of business. Also builds & provides platform to leverage them on various portfolio brands like travelocity.com, ebookers.com,hotels.com
Role

• Provided secondary training to personnel struggling with technological tools and systems.
• Executed troubleshooting and server support whenever needed in critical phases.
• Provided technical support in live sites & campaigns.
• Communicated regularly with customers concerning data exchange and technology integration.
• Coordinated when new projects, defined scope and managed milestones.
• Reviewed and assessed architecture design, implementation, testing and deployment needs to identify project requirements and costs.
• Produced reports on success rates and remedial requirements.
• Identified and corrected system faults to minimize operational system downtime.
• Worked closely with the teams to plan, develop and execute technical strategies aligned to client's vision.

Project - Carrentals.com (Expedia group) URL: https://www.carrentals.com

• Carrentals.com is the premier car rental booking company on the web, offering advanced , easy-to-use technologies to consumers and select vendor partners alike.
• The site connects directly with suppliers' inventory to provide consumers with value-priced one-way or round trip car rentals at thousands of on and off-airport locations worldwide, with big brand names like Hertz and Enterprise, as well as smaller regional carriers, like Ace and U-Save.

Special features delivered-

• Cancellation Retry Mechanism: Developed a system where if cancellation failed with the supplier for a specific Connection Problem we would retry after a fixed interval of time and there will be a fixed number of retries. Saves around 7% of cancellation issues from Customer.
• Send email feature: Providing list of bookings to customer from ui for non logged in customers who neither have bookings id nor logging credentials.
• Car Image Retrieval System: Different Suppliers have Different Car images to Display in UI, These image Links were provided in the Search Response. Previously Supply Operations Team would manually Download and save it to a location for displaying in UI. Automated the whole process using AWS Lambda to Download
  Images from links in Search Response and save it to s3 for UI. Saves 90% efforts.
• Built up Splunk Dashboard - Built splunk dashboard for monitoring daily reservations & cancellations failures of car bookings which apparently helped to track orders and minimize failures.

Role :

• Coding & implementation of features.
• Direct communication with 3rd party tools/service/utility providers
• Monitoring and tracking of the project on a daily basis System integration, deployment and support for production or QA releases
• Conducted code reviews and performance tuning sessions
• Supported team to prepare test strategy, test scenarios and test cases
• Shouldered responsibility of Development, Testing and Deployment.
• Built outstanding and dynamic team of software engineers and developers which significantly boosted overall success of organization.
• Tested troubleshooting methods, devised innovative solutions, and documented resolutions for inclusion in knowledge base for support team use.

Project: B2B Web Services(Cisco ordering)

• B2B web services comprises of 3 different flows of web services which essentially are SOAP/REST based applications like Config, Estimate and Quoting web services which uses OAGI/Custom standards to communicate with partner system.
• Partner systems are integrated with the service provider enabling the partner to place an order directly to the service providers system.

Role :

• Designed and Development of webservices.
• Fixed bugs that arose in the existing system and handled change requests to WS.
• Migrated the database of application from oracle to Mongo DB.
• Made enhancements to the application by implementing CXF for SOAP services and optimizing older logic.
• Implemented testNG for UTs their by increasing the unit test case coverage to over 80 %, helping code maintenance and easy enhancement.
• Preemptively reduced sonar issues of the application.
• Migrated project to multi-module maven project.
• Ad-Hoc Projects: •Failed Transaction Finder •E-mail Notification Checker.
• Ability to work within deadlines.
• Conducted regression testing, analyzed results and submitted observations to development team.