In college, I was written off as someone who would never amount to much. Being detained twice was humiliating, but it became the turning point in my life. I realized that if I didn’t take control, no one else would. So, I rebuilt myself with discipline, consistency, and a refusal to quit,” Kunduru says.
That determination and dedication to course-correcting his path led him not only to graduate but also to build a career marked by solving problems others considered impossible.
The Reset Button
Kunduru’s college years were difficult for him, and he admits to struggling with discipline and direction.
“Many people around me, including my own family, believed I would follow the same path as my father, who never found success,” Kunduru explains.
It was his discovery of software engineering that inspired him to change his life. He says he was intrigued by building something from “nothing but logic and determination.” Technology was his reset button, and he pushed it.
From Startup to Tech Leadership
After graduating, Kunduru joined an agriculture-focused startup. As an associate software engineer, he developed impactful technical solutions for the company. He was awarded Employee of the Year and received the Innovation of the Year Award in 2013.
“That job became my true foundation. Because it was a startup, I had to do everything: front-end, backend API, database, deployment, and support. It forced me to grow rapidly and taught me the value of hard work and responsibility,” Kunduru says.
Kunduru would later work on high-impact projects for Innova Solutions. Again, his hard work and dedication led to his being promoted twice within four years. He became the principal software engineer, leading a team of 12 engineers.
After Kunduru moved to the United States in 2020 to work with leading healthcare clients, he was approached by a former client seeking to hire him for his tech leadership and delivery record. He led NLP (natural language processing) and OCR (optical character recognition) initiatives in large-scale healthcare projects. His work processed over 158 million health records to generate insights for entire patient cohorts, revealing patterns that informed care decisions across populations.
“I’ve been fortunate to build a career defined by curiosity, continuous learning, and solving complex engineering challenges,” Kunduru says.
Shifting To Fintech Engineering
Kunduru decided to shift his career into the FinTech industry in 2022 when he joined M&T Bank. His hard work, dedication to continuous learning, and results were quickly recognized, leading to his becoming an SME and Tech lead within a year.
As a team leader of 6 engineers, he oversaw the creation of enterprise-grade microservices and the delivery of an Adobe ColdFusion migration from 2016 to 2023 that improved performance by 33% and reduced server load by 30%, enabling faster, more reliable service for 2.5+ million customers. His engineering leadership earned him second place in the M&T Cybersecurity Secure Coding Tournament and third place in the Secure Coding Championship, competing against engineers across the entire technology organization.
“I became the first engineer to successfully establish Kerberos authentication between on-prem Windows servers and Azure COLO at M&T Bank, a feat even Adobe told us was impossible,” Kunduru says.
Building the Future
Kunduru aspires to remain a technology leader, driving innovations that impact millions of people worldwide. He wants to mentor future engineers who come from “humble or challenging backgrounds” as he did and show them that success is a “decision, not a privilege.”
“What makes me stand out is not just the technical capability, it’s the resilience.
I went from being labelled a failure to becoming someone recognized for solving problems others give up on. My journey shows that your background doesn’t limit your potential, your perseverance does,” Kunduru says.
This story was published under HackerNoon’s