Ranjani Thirumalai

Executive Leadership and Strategy

• Led a 40+ member engineering team, driving the vision, roadmap, and execution of Data Security Platform products.
• Spearheaded GenAI-driven data security innovations, accelerating feature delivery by 35%, and increasing customer adoption by 20% YoY.
• Partnered cross-functionally with Product, UX, and GTM teams to align engineering investments with business objectives.

Technical Delivery and Product Innovation

Headed the delivery of the below product initiatives.

• Sensitive Data Inventory Visualization aggregating sensitive asset details across SaaS Inline DLP, SaaS API DLP, Email DLP, Endpoint DLP, and Web Browsers, with rich contextual insights (users, data profiles, applications, peripherals).
• Endpoint DLP for Peripheral Devices, offering real-time protection against data loss via USB, Bluetooth, and external drives, reducing unauthorized data transfers by 40%.
• Centralized Incident Management and Response System, an AI-powered incident response platform, streamlining investigations and reducing resolution time by 50% through automated alerts and intelligence sharing.
• Unsupervised LLM for data categorization and sensitivity ranking, an AI-driven classification model with a ranking service to prioritize sensitive data, and enable advanced contextual filtering for enhanced governance.

Operational Excellence and Cost Optimization

• Drove a 20% cost reduction through cloud infrastructure optimization and process efficiency improvements.
• Drove process improvements in an environment with limited FS reviews, test coverage, and monitoring, which previously had insufficient mechanisms for detecting failures. Implemented a structured workflow with mandatory PRD, UX, and FS reviews before development. Enforced quality testing, strong code coverage, and robust logging and alerting reduce silent failures and enhance product stability.

People, Leadership, and Culture

• Scaled a high-performing, diverse engineering team, growing headcount by 15% across backend, frontend, ML, and QA roles.
• Fostered a culture of ownership, collaboration, and innovation, boosting team productivity by 25%.

Leadership and Talent Development

• Led and mentored teams of 20 or more engineers, fostering innovation, collaboration, and technical excellence. Recruited and built diverse, high-performing teams to drive key cybersecurity initiatives.

Product Development and System Optimization

• Led core infrastructure and platform services for VMware Carbon Black’s Threat Detection and Response products. Spearheaded the redesign of VMware Carbon Black's monolithic threat detection platform into a scalable, low-latency microservices architecture, reducing COGS by over 50%.

Advanced ML and Threat Detection

• Collaborated with data scientists to develop advanced ML models, leveraging techniques such as Locality Sensitive Hashing, Clustering, and Anomaly Detection, to enhance threat intelligence.

Portfolio Expansion and Innovation

• Expanded team ownership to key revenue-generating product modules. Enabled patent filings, and facilitated team presentations at technical conferences.

Enterprise Security and Authentication

• Led the development of VMware NSX authentication solutions, driving a 25% year-over-year revenue growth. Championed product security initiatives, addressing critical vulnerabilities.

Customer Impact and Escalation Management

• Managed high-priority customer escalations, resolved 900+ complex issues, improved developer productivity, and reduced build times.

Recognition and Contributions

• I served on VMware’s internal technical conference committee (Radio) and received multiple Spot Awards for outstanding contributions.

Designed multi-tenancy solutions for Oracle Web Services Manager (OWSM). Enhanced web service security policies for OWSM, and optimized OWSM configuration manager.