Ricardo Esponda

About Ricardo Esponda

15+ years of creative, empathetic, and results-driven leadership managing large, complex Engineering and Operations technology organizations, leading the development and delivery of IT infrastructure strategies, modernization initiatives, and customer experience and M&A programs. Extensive experience in architecture, engineering, operations, and cyber controls for mission-critical infrastructure and applications in hybrid cloud and on-premises environments, leveraging ML, AIOps, and automation frameworks. Proven leadership of 24/7 customer-facing operations, including Technology Operations Centers, Command and Control Centers, change management, incident and problem management, root cause analysis, and disaster recovery. This strong combination of expertise and leadership enables me to deliver tangible results in Engineering and COE Operations Excellence, building high-performing teams in psychologically safe environments rooted in diversity, inclusion, and belonging, where people thrive, innovate, and achieve their goals. •Transformed Walmart’s Command Center from reactive firefighting into a proactive, predictive SRE, ML/AIOps-driven organization.•Delivered 35% Major Incident reduction across 4,600+ US stores and eCommerce Walmart.com avoiding millions of dollars in financial loss and brand impact.•Achieved 40% reduction in MTTR (Mean time to Resolve).•Established Automation, ML/AIOps-First strategy across the Command and Control Center and SRE teams to improve reliability at Walmart.•Led high-profile M&A integrations (Hibernia, North Fork, Chevy Chase, HSBC, ING) into Capital One’s ecosystem.•Designed strategy and solution of Enterprise-wide users to Cloud Cisco Unified Collaboration $4M.•Delivered AWS Connect and Lex for a contact center, boosting speed-to-market and customer satisfaction.•Designed and built global network and infrastructure for seats contact center, overseeing a $16M program.•Modernized 700+ retail branches with a $10M VoIP and network upgrade.•Transformed traditional infrastructure teams into high-performing DevOps with 80% AWS certification Cloud: AWS, EC2, Route 53, ELB, S3, K8 KubernetesContact Center: Amazon Connect• Avaya • Cisco UCCE • NICE • Verint• Dialers• SBCNetwork: TCP/IP • WAN • LAN • Routers • QoS • MPLS • SD-WAN • DNS • Load Balancers • SIP • VoIPUnified Collaboration: Zoom • Teams • Slack • Webex • CUCM • WebRTCObservability: Splunk, Grafana, ELK, PagerDuty, DataDog, New Relic

Experience

1. Sr Director Software Engineering - Sre

   Walmart Global Tech

   Oct 2021 — Present · Dallas-Fort Worth, TX, US

   Head of the Command and Control Center for Walmart and Sam’s, trusted and accountable for safeguarding the technology operations of customer facing, mission-critical applications, platforms, and infrastructure that power every Walmart Store, Sam’s Club, Supply Chain, Home Office, and Walmart.com across the U.S, with matrix responsibility for international markets in Mexico, Central, and South America.I also lead a high-performing, globally distributed organization of 200+ software engineers responsible for Production Support, SRE, and COE Operations Excellence across one of the largest multi and hybrid cloud ecosystems. My responsibilities include establishing and driving the adoption of modern operations and engineering practices in SRE, ML/AIOps, intelligent automation, incident and problem management, blameless postmortems, root cause analysis, and change management in close partnership with Engineering, DevOps, and Business stakeholders.

Education

• B.S. Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering

  Bachelor’s Degree, Electrical, Electronics and Communications Engineering