Shailja Saxena

• Leadership & Talent Development - Serve as the India Lead for the tribe/train, fostering collaboration across geographies.
• End-to-End Delivery Management for strategic products, ensuring timely and quality releases.
• Architecting solutions for both new developments and enhancement initiatives across platforms. Reviewed and approved high- and low-level design proposals to guarantee scalability, resilience, and architectural consistency.
• Spearheaded strategic internalization, transitioning from high-cost external vendors to fully self-sufficient internals, resulting in significant cost savings and improved agility.
• Identified recurring blockers (process, tooling, or skill gaps) and established cross-functional task forces to resolve them.
• Define and own the tribe’s technical roadmap in close collaboration with Product Managers, Tribe Leads, Architects, and Chapter Leads—aligning architecture with business strategy.
• Drive prioritization of engineering epics and cross-squad objectives to streamline delivery and amplify technical impact.
• Accelerated tech debt remediation by retiring end-of-life software, consolidating redundant repositories, cutting maintenance costs, and improving developer efficiency across global squads.
• Mentored engineering leads and senior developers to accelerate their technical leadership capabilities.
• Conducted interviews and managed hiring processes for both permanent employees and vendor resources across multiple geographies.
• Leading technical excellence and continuous improvement through enhanced production stability, performance optimization, improved release frequency, streamlined deployment processes, technology upgrades, storage, and cost optimizations.
• Accelerate AI adoption and innovation by promoting effort and time savings through AI in code development for OSS issue resolution, increasing test coverage, Java version upgrades, knowledge bank creation, and data analysis.

• Led delivery management and product ownership for multiple products, ensuring cohesive execution across streams.
• Planned, tracked, and monitored release cycles with rigorous risk management to uphold timelines and quality standards.
• Designed wallet products using domain-driven design to define microservices. Ensured each microservice was independently deployable and scalable, aligning with specific business capabilities, in accordance with the 12-factor app principles.
• Drove product enhancements and service maturity initiatives, collaborating with stakeholders to optimize performance.
• Defined feature roadmaps and prioritized backlogs in partnership with Strategy team to coordinate development.
• Facilitated PI planning and breakout sessions for three product lines while coaching teams on Agile practices.
• Acted as interim Scrum Master, Business Analyst, Product Owner, or Consultant to maintain project momentum.
• Championed self-sustaining team model by introducing expertise frameworks and guiding their implementation.
• Managed cross-functional team of developers, consultants, testers, analysts, and contractors to meet project demands.

• Lead end-to-end delivery and program management of large-scale development initiatives, encompassing planning, tracking, financial forecasting (GP tracking), and continuous risk and issue management.
• Drive business growth by expanding global delivery penetration, sourcing new leads, and collaborating with architects and tower leads to define solution strategy and outlines.
• Drove global delivery expansion and new lead generation to accelerate account growth.
• Managed program finances (GP tracking and forecasting) to optimize profitability.
• Led diverse teams—from senior architects to graduate hires—ensuring peak performance.
• Partnered with architects to define solution strategies and fuel portfolio growth.
• Executed enterprise-wide Bluemix rollout for the financial services sector.
• Oversee resource planning and staffing, optimizing a diverse talent pool—from senior architects and leads to junior members and graduate hires—to meet evolving program needs.
• Maintain stakeholder engagement through executive, weekly, and monthly reporting to clients and IBM partners, while ensuring compliance with external/internal audits (RRA, ISO27001, DS&P) and 7Keys reporting.
• Establish new offshore development centre with robust network, physical, and system-level security controls, and spearhead enterprise-wide Bluemix implementation for the FSS sector.
• Cultivate a high-performance culture by motivating teams, resolving conflicts, driving knowledge management, and championing continuous upskilling and career progression.

Risk Management & Requirements Analysis Solution Architecture & Design Project Planning & Delivery Management On-site Coordination & Stakeholder Engagement. Development, Testing, and Agile Implementation.

• Gathered and analyzed operational requirements for new and existing products to define project scope and functional specifications.
• Performed detailed function-point estimation and resource projections for all modules, producing proof-of-concepts for proposed system changes.
• Conducted ongoing requirement workshops with U.S.-based business users and PMO to refine priorities across multiple release cycles.
• Led solution architecture design and component breakdowns on-site, aligning with enterprise standards and ensuring scalability.
• Facilitated design and code reviews, translating client-approved architectures into actionable technical tasks for offshore teams.
• Authored technical proposals and process definitions to guide development governance, and quality control.
• Developed and maintained integrated project plans, encompassing cost estimates, budget forecasts, risk mitigation strategies, and critical-path schedules.
• Negotiated estimates, timelines, and resource allocations with on-site stakeholders, securing alignment on deliverables and bottom-line commitments.
• Tracked progress through status reporting and variance analysis, driving corrective actions to keep delivery on track.
• Served as the on-site application expert in the U.S., bridging communication between the PMO, business users, and offshore teams.
• Coordinated beta, UAT, and production support environments, ensuring smooth handoffs and rapid issue resolution.
• Mentored new team members in domain knowledge and technical skills, fostering a high-performance culture.
• Managed end-to-end development and performance testing of allocation and risk-management modules, including environment setup and defect remediation.
• Implemented a partial agile framework, prioritizing tasks by business value, and delivering incremental releases to accelerate time-to-value.
• Oversaw offshore-on-site delivery pipelines, optimizing collaboration, and maintaining consistent code quality.

• Conducted comprehensive requirements analysis, translating business needs into detailed technical specifications.
• Architected system designs aligned with functional requirements, scalability goals, and enterprise standards.
• Led design and code review sessions to enforce best practices, ensure quality, and mitigate architectural risks.
• Developed core components, addressed defects, and implemented change requests to enhance system functionality.
• Integrated modules and executed end-to-end testing to validate seamless interoperability and performance.
• Customized product features and configurations to fulfill client-specific requirements and optimize user experience.