Prajeesh Thirunala

About Prajeesh Thirunala

Accomplished senior technology leader with proven experience in delivering large scale technology transformations and scaling global technology centers. Possesses deep engineering expertise in large scale cloud native systems and leverages strong domain expertise and business knowledge to drive operational excellence and innovation.• Large scale transformations: Executed multi-year high-impact product transformations and compliance programs cutting across enterprise, and involving modernization of low latency, high throughput payment systems• Global Engineering & Site Leadership: Built and managed cross-functional distributed teams across multiple geographies. Recruited and scaled leadership to establish technical center of excellence enabling enterprise location strategy, handling large annual budgets. Scaled global capability center and developed technology center of excellence delivering large enterprise initiatives•Mission-Critical Platform Delivery: Designed and built highly available and resilient transaction platforms to handle multi- billion dollar daily payment volume, leveraging cloud native distributed architecture• Hand-on Technical Leadership: Ability to influence and contribute across different software development life cycles with proven experience of 18+ years as a Technology Leader• People Leadership: Developed followership across organization, groomed and developed several employees across the organization to leadership positions, including that of executive leadership

Experience

1. Vice President of Engineering

   American Express

   Mar 2019 — Present · Bengaluru, IN

   As the Vice President of Technology, I spearheaded strategic initiatives to modernize the Payment Network, managing a budget of over $30 million annually. Modernization involved technology transformation from Mainframes and other legacy stack to OpenShift Container platform as horizontally scaled micro services, and utilizing technologies such as Golang, Java, Couchbase, Redis, Cassandra, Kafka, Spark, Prometheus etc. It enables American Express global payments with a capacity of several thousands of transactions per second in real-time transaction processing, daily batch data processing of terrabytes of data, and settling payment volumes in billions of dollars. I led the growth of the Global Payment Network organization to over 400 employees in 5 years at Bangalore, establishing it as the largest center globally within American Express. As part of global expansion and regulatory compliance, I led global initiatives to ensure data localization and local processing compliance in India and led a key role in delivering card payment processing for Amex in China making it the first global payment network company to operate in China.As the Site Lead of American Express Bangalore, I played a critical role in growing the center from 300+ employees to over 2500+ employees in a span of 5 years. I collaborated with Collaborated with Product, Real Estate, Legal and other business functions in selecting and developing a state-of-the-art facility for American Express at Bangalore, and lead a cross-functional site leadership team consisting of 15+ senior leaders running site specific strategic initiatives in alignment with the global enterprise, as well as overseeing day to day site operations.

Education

• Indian Institute of Management Bangalore

  Executive General Management Program, General Management

  2013 — 2014

• National Institute of Technology Calicut

  Bachelor's Degree, Computer Science & Engineering

  1994 — 1998

Skills

• Quantitative Methods
• Product Strategy
• Customer Relationship Management (Crm)
• Software Project Management
• Crm
• Software Engineering
• Redis
• Oracle
• Requirements Analysis
• Representational State Transfer (Rest)
• Quality Automation
• Multithreading
• Xml
• Rest
• Weblogic
• Middleware
• Java Enterprise Edition
• Enterprise Software
• Docker
• Enterprise Architecture
• Budgeting
• Cassandra
• Saml
• Five9
• Swagger
• Solaris
• Oauth
• High Availability
• Java
• Linux
• Service-Oriented Architecture (Soa)
• Software Development
• Scrum
• Software Design
• Web Service Security
• Soa
• Json
• Jms
• C
• Agile Methodologies