Aparna Ponguru

Defined and executed the product strategy for PayPal’s core Vault API (link), a foundational platform enabling the secure storage and reuse of 20M+ customer payment credentials across global checkout experiences in 100+ markets. Scaled the platform to support additional payment methods—including Apple Pay, SEPA Direct Debit, and ACH—enhancing flexibility and improving conversion for millions of merchants.

Key Achievements:

• Customer-Centric Platform Innovation & Future Readiness:
  Solved a major merchant pain point around fragmented customer and payment data by launching the Vault Customer API, enabling merchants to securely store both customer profiles and payment methods in a centralized platform. This functionality supports seamless, token-based checkouts across channels. The solution reduced operational complexity, improved conversion, and is projected to drive $500M in incremental revenue through increased payment reuse and customer lifetime value.
• Global Expansion, Strategic Partnerships & Payment Method Scalability:
  Led the global rollout of the Vault API, enabling localized compliance and secure payments across 190 countries. Partnered with strategic platforms—including Shopify and Stripe—to guide their migration from legacy systems and accelerate adoption of PayPal’s modern API stack. Scaled the platform to support new payment methods, including Apple Pay, SEPA Direct Debit, and ACH, increasing payment flexibility and driving conversion improvements for millions of merchants worldwide.
• Risk Mitigation & Platform Resilience:
  Led a cross-functional incident response to a massive carding attack generating 10M+ fraudulent calls per day, coordinating with risk, engineering, and legal teams to mitigate $1M+ in potential issuer fines and safeguard platform integrity.

Led the end-to-end strategy, execution, and delivery of the Selling Partner API (SP-API) platform for Amazon’s global developer ecosystem. Drove platform modernization efforts to enable scalable integrations for 3P developers and Selling Partners across multiple regions and business lines.

Key Achievements:

• Platform Modernization & Revenue Impact:
  Launched Data Kiosk, a new reporting platform (link) replacing the legacy API system used by 3P developers and Selling Partners. Owned product strategy, execution, and migration involving 80+ internal teams, resulting in a 20% increase in GMS, $304M in incremental FCF, and $2M in annual infrastructure cost savings.
• Global Expansion of Seller Reporting Systems:
  Built a scalable platform to support global selling experiences for 5M+ Selling Partners, enabling consolidated reporting and data access. This initiative contributed to a 30% YoY increase in seller GMS and streamlined seller operations across geographies.
• Developer Adoption & GTM Execution:
  Led the Product Marketing and Field Ops team to drive developer engagement and product adoption through coordinated GTM initiatives—SEO, targeted campaigns, summits, and YouTube content. Increased developer conversion and product adoption by 30%, while scaling ops through automation.
• Analytics & Data-Driven Decision Making:
  Designed and deployed dashboards in AWS Quicksight to measure API usage, platform health, and business impact. Established success metrics and KPIs across adoption, entitlement, availability, and latency—used to drive product reviews and decision-making org-wide.
• Strategic Planning & Scaled Agile Transformation:
  Led Annual Operational Planning for goals, headcount, and program allocation; presented plans to executive leadership. Spearheaded Agile transformation—introducing Program Increment (PI) planning, improving delivery velocity by 2x and reducing flow time by 50% across product teams.

Supported Tier-1 platform infrastructure and tools used by Amazon’s developer ecosystem. Led efforts to improve operational excellence, system readiness, and incident response across 50+ partner teams and high-scale control plane services.

Key Achievements:

• Customer Support Automation & Operational Excellence:
  Reduced support backlog from 150+ open tickets to zero in 3 months by identifying systemic issue patterns, creating reusable runbooks, and training Developer Support to handle Level-2 escalations. Recognized with the “Operational Excellence Guru” award for impact.
• Leadership in Operational Reporting:
  Led monthly business reviews with leadership, reporting on budget, ticket resolution SLAs, and security metrics, while driving process improvements to reduce incident resolution time.
• Latency & Availability Governance:
  Launched operational campaigns across 50+ partner teams to define, validate, and enforce latency and availability SLAs, and ensure Swagger model compliance—improving consistency and reliability of platform APIs.
• Tooling & Developer Productivity:
  Designed and launched Spectrum Hub, a centralized internal portal for support tooling, which improved developer issue triaging and resolution efficiency by 10%.
• Infrastructure Readiness & Chaos Testing:
  Built load and chaos testing infrastructure for Tier-1 control plane services handling ~100B monthly requests, significantly enhancing system resilience.
• Peak Event Readiness & Scalability Planning:
  Orchestrated Prime Day and Q4 Game Day simulations for 50+ critical services, ensuring peak readiness and platform scalability during the highest traffic periods of the year.