Sivashankar Thiyagarajan

• Built a 130-member Engineering Organization from the ground up, leading Engineering, DevSecOps, and SRE functions, and establishing a high-performance culture focused on scalability, reliability, and innovation.
• Driving cloud transformation and re-architecture of the brownfield Mutual Funds Registrar and Transfer Agency (RTA) platform to Google Cloud Platform, modernizing a 30+ year-old system to support future-ready growth.
• Led the transformation of monolithic applications into an elastically scalable, distributed microservices architecture, engineered to handle 100 million transactions per day at peak scale, ensuring resilience, elasticity, and operational efficiency.
• Spearheading the build-out of a Data Product ecosystem to deliver self-service reports and insights for fund houses, distributors, and investors, leveraging BigQuery, Striim, and Dataproc (Spark) for advanced analytics and real-time processing.
• Built a RAG-based AI application on Vertex AI to enable developers and product teams to discover and navigate brownfield applications using existing change requests and business requirement specifications, accelerating onboarding and knowledge transfer.
• Architecting next-generation transaction flows with AI Agents in the loop, designed to minimize human intervention, eliminate operational bottlenecks, and improve efficiency across file-based and API-driven channels, positioning CAMS as a leader in autonomous, intelligent transaction processing.
• Technology Stack: Open API & GraphQL for APIs; Core Java, Spring, and React Native for applications; Terraform for Infrastructure as Code; BigQuery & AlloyDB for OLAP and OLTP workloads; Vertex AI for GenAI + RAG applications; GCP as the cloud infrastructure backbone.

• Engineering Leadership: Responsible for leading Customer Relationship Management (CRM) core modules, managing a 50-member engineering team, and ensuring delivery of scalable, resilient, and business-critical systems.
• Developer Productivity Transformation: Driving the organization-wide developer productivity charter by defining and operationalizing metrics using the SPACE framework. Established structured processes to measure, benchmark, and improve engineering productivity, enabling faster delivery cycles and higher team efficiency.
• Application Modernization: Leading a team of architects in the re-architecture of legacy Ruby on Rails applications into a modern Java-based microservices stack, ensuring scalability, maintainability, and alignment with cloud-native standards.
• Quality Transformation with AI: Established the North Star for quality improvements across engineering. Enabled AI-powered workflows that automatically generate test scenarios, improving code testability, reducing manual effort, and driving a step-change improvement in software quality and release reliability.

• Organizational Leadership: Built and scaled a 75-member Online Payments Organization from the ground up, spanning Engineering, DevSecOps, and SRE, to deliver mission-critical fintech products and services.
• Business Growth at Scale: Scaled the Payment Aggregator and Gateway business to over ₹4,000 crores GTV month-on-month in under a year, by launching high-value capabilities such as Hosted Checkout and Online Checkout.
• Platform Modernization & Scale: Led the re-architecture of the legacy monolith into a reactive, cloud-native microservices architecture, scaling platform throughput by 25x (from 10 TPS to 250 TPS) while ensuring reliability and elasticity.
• Revenue-Generating Merchant Services: Established a Value-Added Services stack for merchants, including Affordability, Payouts, Tokenization, and Subscriptions. Successfully scaled the Affordability suite for EMI Payments to 100 TPS, unlocking new revenue streams and market differentiation.
• Engineering Excellence:
  Observability Charter – Built an enterprise-wide observability framework using OpenTelemetry standards for real-time visibility.
  Cloud-Native Operations – Implemented GitOps with Terraform for Day 0 provisioning and GitHub pipelines for Day 1 CI/CD automation.
  SRE Practices – Established Day 2 operational rigor with dashboards, alerting, and monitoring using New Relic, PagerDuty, and ELK stack, ensuring reliability and performance at scale.

• Architecture Leadership: Led the technical architecture and design of the Payments Switch and Tokenization platforms, driving adoption of reactive, cloud-native microservices architecture to ensure scalability, high availability, and resilience.
• Platform Scalability & Reliability: Scaled the payments platform to process ~2.5 million card transactions per day, ensuring consistent performance under peak global workloads.
• Conversion Rate Optimization: Designed and implemented a circuit breaker mechanism for the Payments Switch, improving payment success rates by 50 basis points and significantly enhancing transaction reliability and customer experience.
• Engineering Leadership: Directed a 20+ member engineering team across platform and business charters. Key initiatives included:
  Reactive Payments Stack – Implemented using RxJava, ensuring application-level scalability and responsiveness.
  Platform Observability – Established monitoring and tracing using OpenTelemetry (OTEL) standards, delivering real-time insights into platform performance.
  Dynamic Configuration Rollouts – Enabled configuration changes without downtime, increasing agility and reducing operational risk.
  Global Payment Connectivity – Built and deployed payment connectors for direct integrations with networks and processors such as Visa, Mastercard, Omnipay, FDMS, NetGiro, and CUP, expanding market reach and resilience.

• Team Leadership: Led a 10+ member engineering team, driving end-to-end development, mentoring junior engineers, and building a high-performing culture of delivery and technical excellence.
• Product Development: Designed and delivered the Subscription & Recurring Payments platform, enabling seamless recurring billing and revenue growth opportunities for merchants.
• Stakeholder Collaboration: Partnered with cross-functional teams and business stakeholders to translate requirements into scalable, high-quality solutions, ensuring alignment with strategic goals.
• Problem Solving & Innovation: Defined complex engineering challenges, analyzed data, and applied innovative solutions to resolve critical project issues.
• Platform Enhancements:
  Implemented feature requests and enhancements for the Payment Gateway platform, strengthening reliability, performance, and customer adoption.
  Designed and developed a Payment Simulator to decouple testing from external vendors, mimicking external partner payload validation. This enabled faster quality sign-off and accelerated delivery timelines without dependency on third-party availability.
• Talent Development: Mentored and coached junior and entry-level engineers, accelerating professional growth and improving overall team capability.

• Designed and developed merchant-facing products on the Payment Gateway platform.
• Implemented feature enhancements for existing applications, improving functionality and performance.
• Contributed to PCI DSS compliance projects, ensuring security and regulatory adherence.
• Collaborated with Product Owners and QA to perform root cause analysis, reducing live issues.
• Hands-on development in Core Java, Spring, and Struts, delivering scalable solutions.
• Enhanced software functionality by identifying and resolving complex technical issues.

Built an automated reconciliation module in Core Java to validate trades across systems, eliminating manual effort.

• Implemented new features and automated risk reporting workflows, improving efficiency of the risk management platforms

• Developed and enhanced features for Registrar & Transfer Agency platforms and Clearing & Settlement systems for Derivatives & Equities.
• Automated functional test cases, improving release efficiency and quality.
• Led a team of 6 engineers in feature delivery and system enhancements.