Sivashankar Thiyagarajan
Engineering Leader
Chennai
Summary
Accomplished engineering leader with 18 years of experience in leadership and technical architecture. Proven track record of establishing high-performance engineering teams. Specializes in building large-scale green field transactional and analytical systems and transformation of brownfield applications. Possesses strong subject matter knowledge in areas such as Payment Switch, Tokenization, Merchant Payouts, Payment Aggregation, Payment Orchestration, Mutual funds RTA, and two-sided marketplaces. Collaborated with renowned companies including PayPal, Pine Labs, Freshworks and CAMS.
Accomplishments
- Built products like Tokenization, Merchant Payouts, Recurring Billing, Payments Aggregator, Payments Orchestrator and Payments Switch from scratch in Pine Labs. In this tenure, built the Online Payments Org from grounds up including Engineering, DevSecOps and SRE
- Large Scale transformation of the Payments Switch to Microservices based architecture and payment success rate improvement by building a dynamic payment route optimization algorithm backed by circuit breaker in PayPal
- Large Scale Transformation of both the applications stack and deployment architecture of the Mutual Funds RTA applications to Cloud. A Legacy product of over 30 years old with no documentation and an existing database compute based stack presented a challenging tech transformation with co-existence as business constraint
Overview
19
19
years of professional experience
7
7
years of post-secondary education
Work History
Head of Engineering , Vice President
Computer Age Management Services
07.2024 - Current
- Building 130 member Engineering Organization from ground up leading Engineering, DevSecOps and SRE
- Driving Cloud transformation and Re-architecture of the Brownfield Mutual Funds Registrar and Transfer Agency capabilities to Google Cloud Platform
- Transformation of the Monolithic application to an elastically scalable distributed microservice architecture. The system is designed to handled 100 million transactions per day at peak
- Driving the buildout out of a Data Product which can offer self service reports and Insights to Fund houses, Distributors and Investors using BigQuery, Striim and Dataproc (Spark)
- Built a RAG based AI application on top of VertexAI to enable developers and product in the discovery of the brownfield app using the existing Change Requests, Business Requirement Specifications
- Tech Stack includes Open API and GraphQL for APIs, Core Java, Spring and React Native for Applications, Terraform for Infra as Code, Big Query & Alloy DB for OLAP and OLTP respectively and GCP as Cloud Infrastructure
Director of Engineering
Freshworks
10.2023 - 07.2024
- Responsible for Engineering leadership for Customer Relationship Management core modules leading team of 50
- Leading overall Developer productivity charter. Defined a process using SPACE framework to measure and improve the productivity
- Leading team of architects in re-architecture of legacy applications written in Ruby on Rails to Java based Microservices stack
- Established North Star for overall Quality Improvements and enabled testability of code through workflows based on automatic test scenario generation through AI
Director of Engineering
Pine Labs
11.2021 - 09.2023
- Head of Engineering for Online Payments and Established a 75-person Online Payments org from ground up
- Scaled the Payment Aggregator and Gateway business to 4000+ crores GTV month-on-month in less than a year by building capabilities like Hosted Checkout and Online Checkout
- Rearchitecture of the Legacy Monolith to reactive Microservices Architecture in Cloud Native Stack and scaled the Platform to 25x in terms of throughput upto 250 Transactions per second
- As revenue generators for the organization, established the Value Added Services Stack for Merchants such as Affordability, Payouts, Tokenization and Subscriptions
- Scaled the Affordability suite for EMI Payments to support up to 100 Transactions per Second
- Built the Observability charter using Open Telemetry standards
- Implemented Git Ops for the stack with Terraform for Day 0 operations and GitHub pipelines for Day 1 operations
- Implemented SRE practices for Day 2 operations and implemented Dashboards, Alerting and Monitoring using suite of tools like New Relic, PagerDuty and ELK stack
Senior Member of Technical Staff
PayPal
11.2014 - 10.2021
- Leading the Technical Architecture for Switch & Tokenisation Payments
- Responsible for the Design and Development of the Payments Switch in the Reactive & Microservices Architecture and the overall Platform Scalability, Availability, Observability, and Resilience
- Designed and Enabled the Circuit Breaker for the Payments Switch that ensured higher payments conversion rate
- Scaled the Payments Platform to handle ~2.5 Million Card Transactions per day
- Addressed design problems and examined various design approaches for effective delivery of Product capabilities
- Managed 20+ Engineers for both Platform and Business engineering charters
Senior Software Engineer
Altimetrik India Pvt Ltd
09.2013 - 10.2014
- Technical Lead for team of 10+ engineers
- Design and Development of Subscription & Recurring Payments product
- Established and maintained productive working relationships with stakeholders
- Defined engineering problems, collected data, established facts and drew conclusions to solve project issues
- Implementation of Feature Requests for existing applications in Payment Gateway
- Mentored and coached entry-level and junior engineers to improve talent and boost skill levels
Senior Software Engineer
Computer Sciences Corporation
08.2011 - 09.2013
- Design and development of new products Merchants using Gateway Applications
- Implementation of Feature Requests for existing applications in Payment Gateway
- PCI Compliance Projects
- Collaborate and work with Product Owner and QA team to reduce live bugs by performing root cause analysis and moving quality upstream
- Demonstrated experience and good hands-on programming experience in Core Java, Spring and Struts
- Worked with project managers, developers, quality assurance and customers to resolve technical issues
- Trained and mentored junior developers and engineers, teaching skills in domain & technology and working to improve overall team performance
- Enhanced software functionality by identifying and resolving complex technical issues.
Analyst, Application Programming
BA Continuum Pvt Ltd
09.2010 - 08.2011
- Understand Legacy Applications that are used to calculate Market Risk and to provide reports to Risk Management Team
- Study legacy Merrill Lynch Trading and Risk Management Applications for integrating and developing into unified system
- Identify areas of Process Improvements and help Team Members in implementing the same
- Implementation of new Features and Automation of the Risk Reports
- Conducted system analysis and implementation to maintain and improve Risk Management systems
- Enhanced interfaces to promote better functionality for users
- Optimized core processes to improve business performance and operational agility
IT Analyst, Application Programming
Tata Consultancy Services
06.2006 - 08.2010
- Worked as Full Stack Engineer
- Feature Requests and Implementation of Registrar and Transfer Agencies
- Clearing & Settlement for Derivatives & Equities
- Automation of Functional test cases
- Lead team of 6 engineers
- Investigated system issues and implemented resolutions to reduce downtime
- Improved systems with addition of new features and infrastructure
Education
Post Graduate - Executive MBA
Great Lakes Institute of Management
Chennai 01.2020 - 01.2022
Post Graduate - Blockchain Management
Amity University
Noida 01.2018 - 01.2019
B Tech - Chemical Engineering
Coimbatore Institute Of Technology
Coimbatore 01.2002 - 01.2006
Skills
System design
Timeline
Head of Engineering , Vice President
Computer Age Management Services
07.2024 - Current
Director of Engineering
Freshworks
10.2023 - 07.2024
Director of Engineering
Pine Labs
11.2021 - 09.2023
Post Graduate - Executive MBA
Great Lakes Institute of Management
01.2020 - 01.2022
Post Graduate - Blockchain Management
Amity University
01.2018 - 01.2019
Senior Member of Technical Staff
PayPal
11.2014 - 10.2021
Senior Software Engineer
Altimetrik India Pvt Ltd
09.2013 - 10.2014
Senior Software Engineer
Computer Sciences Corporation
08.2011 - 09.2013
Analyst, Application Programming
BA Continuum Pvt Ltd
09.2010 - 08.2011
IT Analyst, Application Programming
Tata Consultancy Services
06.2006 - 08.2010
B Tech - Chemical Engineering
Coimbatore Institute Of Technology
01.2002 - 01.2006
Awards
- CEO's Award for Employee of the Year in Pine Labs
- Critical Talent Award in PayPal
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