Syed Mehdi Zaidi

• Led the Program Management function for the Cloud Engineering (PMO) team at HighRadius, providing proper project governance for partners and clients managed by the Cloud Services Team.

Processor Migrations.

• Led the largest processor migration in India, leading HighRadius' transition from AMD to AWS Graviton in a complex cloud environment.
• Successfully orchestrated the end-to-end migration strategy, ensuring a seamless workload transition of over 5,400 workloads, cost optimization, and performance enhancement.
• Collaborated with cross-functional teams to mitigate risks, optimize infrastructure, and drive innovation.
• This large-scale migration positioned HighRadius as a pioneer in Graviton adoption, significantly improving efficiency and scalability, while reducing operational costs.

OS Migrations.

• Successfully led the largest OS migration project at HighRadius Technology, transitioning from CentOS 6 to Rocky Linux 9.3.
• Managed cross-functional teams, coordinated with stakeholders, and ensured a seamless migration of over 8,000 workloads across all cloud and on-premises environments.
• Achieved zero downtime and enhanced system performance, resulting in improved operational efficiency, and cost savings.

Business Continuity and Disaster Recovery.

• Led and managed the Disaster Recovery (DR) initiative at HighRadius for major clients, ensuring business continuity and resilience against potential disruptions
• Designed and implemented robust DR strategies, including automated failover, backup management, and regular DR drills to validate recovery objectives
• Collaborated with cross-functional teams to establish recovery time (RTO) and recovery point objectives (RPO), minimizing downtime and data loss
• Strengthened compliance with industry standards, enhancing the overall reliability and security of critical client applications

Observability

• Implemented Infrastructure and Application Observability across all products at HighRadius using PagerDuty, Prometheus, and Grafana
• Designed and deployed monitoring solutions to enhance system reliability, proactive incident management, and real-time alerting
• Integrated Prometheus for metrics collection, Grafana for visualization, and PagerDuty for automated incident response, reducing downtime and improving operational efficiency
• Established standardized monitoring practices, ensuring seamless observability across cloud and on-premise environments

Security Posture

• Managed and led cloud security initiatives at HighRadius, aligning with AWS and Azure Well-Architected Framework to enhance security, compliance, and risk management
• Implemented robust security controls, including identity and access management (IAM), encryption, network security, and threat detection
• Conducted security assessments, automated compliance monitoring, and ensured adherence to industry standards
• Collaborated with engineering and security teams to establish best practices, mitigating vulnerabilities and strengthening the overall cloud security posture

• Active member of the Azure Cloud Services Delivery (PMO) team for European Services Partners, providing proper project governance for partners and clients managed by the Cloud Services Team.
• Azure Cloud Assessments
• Azure Cloud Migrations
• O365 Mailbox Migrations
• On-Prem to Cloud
• Cloud to Cloud
• 3rd Party to Cloud
• Azure Subscription Migration
• Project Prioritization – Aligning projects to the short-term and long-term goals of the organization and business goals.
• Proper communication – Ensuring all the stakeholders have access to correct information using project status updates, team collaboration channels, review dashboards, and management reports (monthly, quarterly).
• Proper Resource Utilization – Ensuring all project managers and engineers are properly utilized, with proper tracking of all project work and non-project work for all projects.
• Ensuring all the lessons learned in one project are transferred across the cloud services function.

• Role: Service Delivery – Europe
• Client & Region: Carnival UK, UK
• Maintaining high performance levels for service-related processes, and implementing improvement activities wherever necessary
• Ensuring all Carnival UK applications and resources are onboarded onto AWS smoothly with minimal issues during transition phase
• Ensuring Seamless Monitoring and management of all resources on-boarded on AWS
• Taking ownership of critical incidents, coordinating with resolution parties, and establishing effective communication between stakeholders for post-incident reviews
• Ensuring that systems, procedures, and methodologies are in place to support outstanding service delivery
• Coordinated all activities on behalf of the client ensuring a seamless single point of contact for all services requiring immediate support were met
• Ensured all processes and procedures were kept up-to-date and accurately reflected customer environments and requirements
• Liaise with all internal service delivery teams to ensure a consistently high level of service
• Managed and drove all services through the adoption and implementation of ITIL processes and procedures
• Instrumental in the integration of JIRA to OpsRamp (ITSM Tool) for tracking and live updates of issues/tasks being worked on
• Providing accurate and regular reports to the management on performance of the service delivery to Carnival UK management via:
• Weekly Status Review Meeting
• Monthly Status Review Meetings
• Quarterly Business review meetings

• Managed enterprise audit function and was instrumental in achieving ISO 9001:2015 & ISO 27001 certifications and recertification’s without any major non-compliances
• Manage Project Team Members / Team Leads for the project Work Breakdown Structure (WBS) and the associated work-plan breakdown structure

• Managing IT Performance Management
• Managing Incident management
• Ensuring all system incidents reported are correctly logged and tracked to closure
• Analysing issues and root cause for each system incident
• Providing a detailed ageing analysis on pending incidents to CIO and Senior management
• Managing, updating, and tracking of the UAT stream plan
• Ensuring all milestones are in line with the Master Core Banking Plan

• Designed Organizational standards for Quality of Work Products throughout PDLC- Product Development Life Cycle following CMM Level-III guidelines
• Designed and implemented policies and procedures around CMM (Capability Maturity Model) Level-III framework covering complete PLC (Project Life Cycle)

• Represent QA in all phases of product development including requirement, design, testing, implementation, code reviews and support
• Conduct detailed analysis of software development requirements to determine testability
• Perform risk analysis
• Drafted and modified numerous processes defined in key domains such as Quality Management, Project Management, Engineering, Finance and Administration and Service Management defined in the Quality Management System (QMS) based on the SEI-CMM framework
• Trained by KPMG to become CMM based appraisal for internal process improvement (CBA IPI) assessor
• Selected as an assessment team member by KPMG during the SEI-CMM assessment