Nitin Kulkarni
Mason
Summary
- Business Development & Strategic Growth: Partnered with executive stakeholders and sales engineering teams to shape proposals and influence vendor selection, contributing to 15% portfolio growth and improved client acquisition.
- Financial & P&L Accountability: Delivered $12M+ in cloud cost savings through AWS optimization (Savings Plans, reserved instances, consolidation), reframing architecture decisions into portfolio-level financial impact.
- Integration Strategy Leadership: Championed API-first, microservices, and packaged business capability (PBC) strategies, accelerating delivery by 30% and enabling secure integration for payments, fraud prevention, and KYC/AML systems.
- Executive Stakeholder Engagement: Trusted advisor to C-suite and senior business leaders, maintaining executive-level client relations and ensuring auditability, compliance, and risk alignment across portfolios valued at $500M+.
- Mentorship & Team Development: Built architecture practices, authored governance frameworks, and mentored architects and developers, increasing team delivery efficiency by 25% while fostering innovation and leadership readiness.
- Risk & Compliance Alignment: Designed secure, auditable architectures for fraud detection, payments, and case management, reducing compliance risk exposure by 40% and strengthening regulatory assurance.
Overview
15
15
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Principal Enterprise Architect
Bread Financial
10.2023 - Current
- Directed enterprise-level architecture strategy across payments and customer experience portfolios, aligning cloud adoption with regulatory priorities and fraud prevention.
- Architected consolidated payment platforms, reducing reconciliation risk and strengthening governance.
- Architected a Single Payment Engine and Single Source of ACH Information, consolidating processes to reduce reconciliation risk and improve governance.
- Led cloud migration and API-first adoption programs, reframing technical enablement into strategic resilience investments supporting fraud detection and monitoring.
Sr. Enterprise Architect/Technical Manager
Cox Automotive
Cincinnati
03.2022 - 10.2023
- Oversaw AWS migration strategy for high-volume systems, balancing performance gains with cost governance and risk reduction, delivering measurable portfolio savings.
- Directed decomposition of monoliths into microservices and serverless architectures, positioning the transformation as a multi-project modernization program.
- Championed Packaged Business Capability (PBC) strategy, enabling modular delivery and accelerating time-to-market for revenue-generating features.
Sr. Tech Enterprise Architect
Edward Jones
Cincinnati
09.2021 - 03.2022
- Established enterprise API practice, building maturity models and governance frameworks that supported strategic fintech partnerships and client onboarding initiatives.
- Designed microservices and API-led solutions for account servicing and portfolio aggregation, reframing technical solutions into digital integration strategies.
Enterprise Architect Consultant
Fifth Third Bank
Cincinnati
05.2011 - 09.2021
- Directed enterprise architecture roadmaps for consumer and commercial banking portfolios, aligning systems with business strategy, regulatory obligations, and fraud prevention priorities.
- Architected AWS-hosted applications with high availability, fault tolerance, and secure cloud patterns, enabling transactional monitoring and fraud detection.
- Built reference architectures, governed solution designs, and reviewed implementations to ensure alignment with enterprise models and risk management frameworks.
- Contributed to bank-wide API, big data, and cloud strategies to enable analytics-driven fraud detection, screening, and remediation, including vendor POCs and business case development.
- Designed and implemented public and private AWS-hosted applications focusing on high availability, fault tolerance, auto scaling, and secure cloud patterns to support transactional monitoring and detection systems.
- Managed and configured AWS services (EC2, RDS, VPC, S3, CloudWatch, CloudFront, Route 53, DynamoDB, SES, SQS, SNS) to enable secure, auditable infrastructure for critical banking workloads.
- Architected customer 360-degree platforms and rules-engine systems enabling relationship evaluation, offer generation, and consistent tax and reporting-strengthening data governance and identity resolution for fraud prevention.
Education
MS - Data Science
Eastern University
Pennsylvania04.2022
Bachelors - Mechanical Engineering
College of Engineering, Pune
Pune, Maharashtra, India05.1995
Diploma - Computer Engineering Technology
Centre For Development of Advanced Computing
Pune, Maharashtra, IndiaSkills
- Enterprise architecture governance
- AWS Cloud Transformation & Strategic Modernization
- AWS Security & Compliance Leadership (IAM, KMS, CloudHSM, Shield, WAF, Secure VPCs)
- Digital integration platforms
- AWS service optimization
- Data governance compliance
- DevOps & Infrastructure as Code (CloudFormation, Terraform)
- Containerization & Orchestration (ECS,K8s)
- Security architecture risk management
- Executive stakeholder alignment
- Innovation and technology adoption
Early Career Experience
Infosys Technologies | Bridgewater, NJ & Iflex Solutions (Oracle Financials) | Pune, India Project Manager / Technology Architect | Senior Project Lead
- Implemented enterprise architecture frameworks and financial application roadmaps, aligning technology strategies with business and regulatory requirements.
- Designed and delivered secure, compliant, high‑transaction payment and insurance system architectures, emphasizing integration, operational resilience, and auditability.
- Provided technical leadership and solution architecture for enterprise financial systems, ensuring maintainability and regulatory alignment.
- Partnered with business stakeholders and technology teams to translate strategic objectives into actionable solution designs and delivery plans.
Certification
• AWS Certified Architect - Associate
• AWS Certified Architect - Professional (Registered for exam Jan 21st 2026)
• TOGAF 9.1 Certified Enterprise Architect
• Sun Certified Java Professional
• AWS Certified Architect - Professional (Registered for exam Jan 21st 2026)
• TOGAF 9.1 Certified Enterprise Architect
• Sun Certified Java Professional
Timeline
Principal Enterprise Architect
Bread Financial
10.2023 - Current
Sr. Enterprise Architect/Technical Manager
Cox Automotive
03.2022 - 10.2023
Sr. Tech Enterprise Architect
Edward Jones
09.2021 - 03.2022
Enterprise Architect Consultant
Fifth Third Bank
05.2011 - 09.2021
MS - Data Science
Eastern University
Bachelors - Mechanical Engineering
College of Engineering, Pune
Diploma - Computer Engineering Technology
Centre For Development of Advanced Computing