Madan Kumar Thangavel
Summary
Highly accomplished Engineering Executive with 23+ years of experience spearheading transformative technology initiatives across diverse, high-stakes environments, from proprietary Wall Street firms to leading Silicon Valley startups. I specialize in building, scaling, and optimizing engineering organizations and platforms for sustained growth. My leadership has been pivotal in driving complex digital transformations, including large-scale cloud migrations, microservices adoption, and successful M&A integrations. With a proactive investment in AI strategic leadership, I am uniquely positioned to guide organizations in leveraging emerging technologies for competitive advantage and accelerated innovation.
Overview
23
23
years of professional experience
Work History
VP of Engineering
Trinet
Remote
02.2022 - Current
- Spearheaded foundational platform strategy for critical value streams, guiding a matrixed engineering team of over 100 engineers through large-scale legacy modernization to cloud-native, microservices architecture.
- Drove key cloud adoption initiatives, successfully launching the first mission-critical service into the new cloud environment by leveraging established foundational pillars (Infra, Dev Productivity, Platform, Testing), and architecting common modular services.
- Hand-selected by the CTO and CIDO, served on an 8-person executive leadership team to define enterprise-wide, next-generation architectural tenets, and champion organizational technology transformation.
- Managed multi-million-dollar budgets for next-generation platform development, consistently achieving positive ROI, and ensuring transparent executive reporting.
- Acted as the central technical authority for critical legacy components undergoing strangulation, ensuring strategic alignment, and seamless transition paths to the new platform.
Site Lead, VP of Engineering
Zenefits
Vancouver
06.2016 - 02.2022
- Key member of the R&D Executive Team, instrumental in leading Zenefits through a successful M&A process (pre & post-acquisition), demonstrating our advanced platform's value and driving integration activities.
- Served as Site Leader with functional ownership spanning Platform, Infrastructure, HR, and Product-Led Growth, overseeing operations and strategic alignment across these critical domains.
- Significantly scaled Engineering talent across three global offices; grew the Vancouver R&D site by 66% (from 30 to 50 FTEs), expanding capabilities into Project Management and Design.
- Orchestrated a 42% reduction in cloud expenses (over $1M saved) across three years, effectively managing a $4.5M OpEx budget and critical vendor relationships.
- Engineered significant platform performance improvements: Reduced decreased scalability time from hours/days to , and accelerated build time from 90 to , dramatically boosting Speed to Market.
- Built the Cloud Infrastructure, SRE, and DevOps functions from the ground up, establishing foundational capabilities for a rapidly scaling SaaS platform.
- Spearheaded SRED (Scientific Research & Experimental Development) initiatives, securing over $350K annually in tax credits for multiple years.
- Fostered highly collaborative and productive relationships across all key functional areas (Product, Marketing, HR, Legal, Finance) to drive holistic business outcomes.
Director Engineering - Platform
Arcesium
Hyderabad
06.2015 - 06.2016
- Built and scaled a multi-disciplinary engineering organization from 10 to 80+ across Application Development, Database, Cloud Infrastructure, SRE/DevOps, and QA.
- Served as the primary engineering liaison and driver for enterprise-wide cloud adoption, overseeing critical integrations and application refactoring for cloud compatibility.
- Directed the re-architecture of core platform applications (Authentication/Authorization, Middleware, Job Scheduler) from on-premise to cloud-native paradigms.
- Automated cloud environment provisioning, reducing client onboarding time from days to hours.
Associate Director Engineering
D.E.Shaw India P.L.
Hyderabad
08.2002 - 06.2015
- Architected and delivered highly available, scalable web architectures (Apache Tomcat) for front-office applications, drastically reducing application scalability from hours to minutes and failover times to minutes.
- Optimized job execution, improving performance by 60% and scaling throughput 10x (from 50K to 0.5M jobs) for critical financial processes.
- Led a critical data reorganization effort for 10+ years of equities data across 3 servers, eliminating ~5 person-hours of daily manual effort.
- Developed a comprehensive suite of homegrown SDLC applications (build, release) and a continuous build system, elevating firm-wide coding standards and boosting codebase compliance from 50% to 95%.
Education
Wharton Executive Education
Cornell University
Master of Science - Computer
PSG College of Technology
Coimbatore04-2002
Skills
- Cloud Strategy & Architecture ,
- Microservices & Distributed Systems,
- DevOps & CI/CD Excellence,
- AI/ML & System Architecture,
- Strategic Planning & Execution,
- Global Team & Cross functional Leadership
- Organizational Design & Scaling,
Technology & Platform Leadership:
Executive Leadership & Organizational Scaling:
- Talent Acquisition & Development,
- Agile & Lean Methodologies, ,
- Change Management,
- Digital Transformation,
- Value Stream Optimization,
- Stakeholder Engagement,
- Risk Management,
- FinTech Domain Expertise
Business & Product Acumen:
Languages
English
Full Professional
Hindi
Native/ Bilingual
Tamil
Native/ Bilingual
Telugu
Limited
References
References available upon request.
Timeline
VP of Engineering
Trinet
02.2022 - Current
Site Lead, VP of Engineering
Zenefits
06.2016 - 02.2022
Director Engineering - Platform
Arcesium
06.2015 - 06.2016
Associate Director Engineering
D.E.Shaw India P.L.
08.2002 - 06.2015
Wharton Executive Education
Cornell University
Master of Science - Computer
PSG College of Technology
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