Rajesh Akerkar

About Rajesh Akerkar

Accountable for strategy and execution of technology solutions and platforms for Finance, Legal, Facilities, and Administration• Key contributions to several steering council and project review meetings for strategic directions, opportunities, business alignment, multi-year roadmaps, status updates, escalations, risk mitigations, and budgets• Drove all aspects of large-scale and dynamic technology execution from technology strategy, project planning, resource allocation, engineering, quality, scalability, availability, and operations• Evaluated critical business needs, products landscape, competitive bids from various software providers for buy vs build assessment.• Led departmental planning encompassing recruitment, resource allocation, employee development and performance evaluation• Created and reviewed department budgets to align with organizational goals and objectives• Partnered with both On-premise and Cloud Infrastructure teams for infrastructure provisioning, ongoing cost, and necessary upgrades• Spread the Customer first innovative mindset and created a service-oriented culture• Drove modernization efforts to reengineer business application for today’s business needs• Partnered with commercial stakeholders in reimagining and delivering several products as shining examples of Apple values: simple, intuitive, high-quality, and of unprecedented scale.• Presented product(s) vision and its story on several occasions to Apple’s executives highlighting its business impact, competitive landscape, current state, and future direction. • Scaled excellence by building a focused and responsive team of senior engineering managers, software engineers, project managers, quality engineers, dev-ops engineers, and operation personnel for both Apple employees and vendor resources.• Effectively communicated to the engineering team, senior leadership, and business partners, both product strategy and vision, down to product roadmaps, requirements, architecture, technology, and deliverables• Led operational excellence efforts such as SOP, DR/HA, Observability, Single Points of Failures, Reliability Engineering, Emergency Response, Fire drill and Change management for meeting the operational SLAs for critical business applicationsTechnologiesJava Stack, Oracle, Big Data - MongoDB, Elastic Search, AWS, IOS, Distributed and Cloud Computing, SaaS, CI/CD, Splunk, Agile Methodology

Experience

1. VP, Financial Systems Engineering

   GEICO

   Nov 2024 — Present · San Francisco, CA, US

   I am excited to join Berkshire Hathaway\'s GEICO on its multi-year journey to re-platform the insurance industry, reducing friction across customers, partners, marketplaces, segments, channels, and experiences.The Financial Systems Engineering team supports this vision by developing financial products, platforms, and services that facilitate the flow of money between customers, partners, and all parts of the business. We empower every decision-maker with technology and tools to accelerate our digital transformation.

Education

• University of Mumbai

  BS, Computer Engineering

• Stanford University

  Stanford Innovation and Entrepreneurship, Product Innovation & Technology

  2015 — 2017

• Executive Education / Stanford Graduate School of Business

  Stanford LEAD: Corporate Innovation Certificate, Executive Education: Corporate Innovation

  2017 — 2018

Skills

• Organizational Leadership
• Software Architectural Design
• IT Strategy
• Mongodb
• Business Analysis
• Agile Methodologies
• Management
• Finance
• Big Data
• Agile Project Management
• Product Management
• Mobile Devices
• Organization
• Sdlc
• Cross-Functional Team Leadership
• Oracle
• Requirements Analysis
• Cloud Computing
• Iphone
• Strategy
• Project Management
• Software Development
• Software Project Management
• Vendor Management
• Software Development Life Cycle (Sdlc)