Sudhakar Balakrishnan

VP, Software Engineering

📍 Ashburn, VA (Open to Remote/Hybrid)📧 sudhakar_balakrishnan@outlook.com 🔗 LinkedIn

Leadership Summary

Hands-on engineering leader with deep expertise in distributed systems, SaaS platforms, and GenAI (LLM/RAG). Built and scaled global teams at PayPal (1 → 65+ engineers) and delivered measurable outcomes in regulated, high-scale environments—reducing PayPal compliance API latency by 74% (380ms to <100ms) and delivering Visa OFAC screening at 50ms latency with 99% decision accuracy while replacing a $5M/year vendor platform. Led large-scale data platforms (10B records across 180 countries) with a focus on reliability, cost discipline, and execution excellence.

FinTechDigital MediaCloud PlatformsScalable SystemsGen AI

Leadership Competencies

Strategy & Vision

Long-term direction & tech roadmap

Architectural Leadership

System design authority

Roadmap Planning

Product delivery alignment

Delivery Excellence

On-time, high-quality execution

Performance & Reliability

System optimization, SLA management

Technical Debt Mgmt

Code health, modernization

Risk & Compliance

Security, regulatory oversight

Cost Optimization

Budget management, ROI

Talent Recruitment

Building global teams

Talent Development

Mentoring, career guidance

Agile Transformation

Scrum adoption, team velocity

Process Improvement

SDLC optimization, CI/CD, and delivery rigor

Customer First

Obsess over customer impact

Innovation & R&D

Emerging tech adoption

Executive Stakeholder

Alignment & board partnership

Strategic (3)

Operational (3)

Governance (2)

People (4)

Product (3)

Key Achievements

Measurable outcomes delivered across platforms and teams

Premiere: Delivery Success Rate+85%

Visa: Annual Cost Savings$5M / Year

PayPal: API Latency Reduction (<100ms)-74%

PayPal: Global Team Scale (US/Asia)5 → 65+ in < 1 Year

Engineering at Global Scale

Systems architected for massive volume & throughput

10 BillionHistoric records (Premiere)

128 MillionActive Users (PayPal)

193markets (PayPal)

25currencies (PayPal)

5 MillionWeekly transactions screened (Visa)

Technology Vision & Modernization

Strategic evolution of platforms under my leadership

Foundational Scale

SOA & Microservices (modernization)Domain Driven Design (DDD)Low-latency, real-time APIsGlobal scale & localization

Cloud & Big Data

Serverless (AWS)Kafka PipelinesCDC Pipelines for compliance screeningAirflow

Gen AI & Agentic Automation

LLM / RAG WorkflowsAgentic SupportRay ServePredictive Alerting

Engineering Excellence

Driving platform reliability, process discipline, and team productivity

Premiere Digital Services

Critical Production Bugs (P1)

8 → 0100%

ZERO P1 bugs in 9 months of production pushes

Transformation Score (0–100)

17 → 82+65 pts

Teams aligned & productive (Transformation Score: 82, sustainable performance)

Technical Debt Items

53 → 885%

85% debt items resolved, improving platform stability

CI/CD Maturity Level (1–5)

1 → 3.5+2.5 levels

Enterprise-grade CI/CD implemented (automated build, test, deploy with governance).

The Organizational Multiplier

Building, scaling, and optimizing high-performing distributed engineering teams

PayPal - Team Scale & Growth

Total Team Members Scaled65

“Scaled from 1 founding engineer to 65+ engineers globally in <1 year.

Geographic Footprint

US (HQ) - 30%

Asia (Offshore) - 70%

Talent Development

Mentoring & career coaching

Strong retention & team engagement

Process Excellence Focus

Agile Adoption (Productivity)82%

Achieved Transformation Score of 82 (Sustainable Performance)

Cross-Functional Alignment95%

Internal stakeholder alignment across Product, Design, and Engineering

Career Trajectory

Selected roles for scope and impact (not a complete chronology)

Total career: 20+ yrs • Timeline shows selected roles

PayPal

Visa

Premiere Digital

Manager 2/Manager (PayPal)

10 year(s)

Sr. Software Engineer (Visa)

2 year(s)

VP/Director of Engineering (Premiere Digital)

2 year(s)

VP of Software Engineering (Method Hub (Current))

0.75 year(s)

Current

Note: This chart focuses on a few core roles to keep the timeline readable.

Technical Footprint

Executive-level oversight and fluency across modern, scalable architectures

Application Core (FE & BE)

ReactJSReduxAxiosPython/FastAPIJava/SpringNodeJSSOA/Microservices

Data & Persistence

Kafka (Streaming)Airflow (Orchestration)Postgres/Oracle/MySQL (SQL)MongoDB (NoSQL)Redis (Caching)

AI/ML & Analytics

LLM/RAG (Gen AI)Ray Serve (Deployment)HuggingfaceJupyter/Pandas/NumPyQdrant (Vector DB)

Cloud & Infra Strategy

AWS (Multi-Cloud Strategy)GCPDockerPrivate Cloud (Hybrid)

DevOps & Health

Elasticsearch/Splunk (Logging)Prometheus/Grafana (Monitoring)Jenkins/Github Actions (CI/CD)