Ronak Patel

Organizational & Team Leadership

• Led for strategy, delivery, architecture, and execution of the following engineering functions; Cloud Platform, SRE, Enterprise Customer, Identity, IT, Information Security, and Card engineering teams. Grew those engineering functions from approx 25 engineers to approx 100 engineers by recruiting a strong leadership team and developing team structures to align with product & business objectives.
• Responsible for contractor offshore/on-shore/near-shore strategies for engineering by developing strong relationships with partners such as Thoughtworks, Captech, and Globant. Managed a contractor budget of $15 million per year.
• Responsible for leading yearly 3rd party and internal audits regarding Cyber Security (NIST & CIS) & PCI compliance.
• Responsible for $25 million G&A & fixed cost budget. Managed critical vendor relationships such as Google (GCP / Workspaces), AWS, Okta, VGS, and Palo Alto Networks.
• Consistently maintained high employee engagement scores (>85/100 in Culture Amp) every year by fostering a culture of openness, growth, and psychological safety.

Engineering, Architectural, & AI Leadership

• AI Advocate and expert within organization. Enabled AI tooling and presented learning sessions on tools such as Github Copilot, GCP Vertex AI, and AWS Bedrock across the organization.
• Leading architecture and implementation of automated agent notes using LLM for calls, estimated to save $500k / year in agent costs.
• Leading architecture and implementation of automating calls QA process using LLM, estimated to save $1 million / year in agent costs.
• Leading architecture and implementation of Zendesk L1 response via LLM, estimated to save $750k / year in agent costs.
• Initiated and led infrastructure modernization and developer experience initiative by gaining executive buy in on benefits of Gitops and Microservices paradigms.
• Led execution of migrating from Heroku to AWS to GKE on GCP and retooling our CICD pipeline leveraging Gitops (ArgoCD). Improved Lead Time to Change to less than 4 days and increased uptime of all critical services to 99.9%.
• Led implementation of a service registry (Cortex) for service discovery, service scorecards, uptime stats, oncall info, etc..
• Led production cutover of core processor migration from FIS to Tsys, meticulously planning and executing the transition with product and business partners that resulted in a transition with minimal interruptions to key card processing systems.
• Successfully architected and led execution of multiple efforts to modernize key systems around customer, identity, credit/fraud decisioning, core process integration, payments, IVR, and money movement.
• Modernized cyber security function by growing a DevSecOps function, integrating cyber security team within engineering, and implementing new systems and tooling (Cloud based VPN, Okta, Prisma Cloud, Wiz, Workspace One)

• Manage technical aspects of $30 million sales pipeline for strategic GCP System Integration partners.
• Provide technical expertise to GCP's partner ecosystem in streaming data, containerization, and infrastructure abstraction.
• Mature specific GTM GCP partners by driving technical capabilities via training, coaching, and mentoring their engineering teams.
• Technical enablement lead for partner ecosystem for Anthos product, developed video/lab based trainings and helped client site install and development.
• Provided technical oversight and leadership to clients and partners for cloud migration engagements funded by GCP.

• Managed SRE and Control Plan functions for Streaming Data Platform (SDP) by building out highly technical engineering teams across west and east coasts.
• Created collaborative and cohesive team environment, employing agile principles, and developing team culture, leading to highly productive teams.
• Built custom control plane for provisioning and managing kafka clusters, topics, and schemas.
• Improved uptime of systems by developing custom configuration management agents that would self-heal infrastructure components.
• Leveraged event driven architectures for real-time analysis of monitoring data at 20k events per second.

• Lead cloud and agile adoption at College Board by creating cloud and agile centers of excellence that drove CB's digital transformation in engineering.
• Lead implementation of Exadata at Samsung Telecom in America
• Lead Tableau implementation at PNC's Risk Department
• Lead engineering efforts for ThermoFisher's pricing analytics system.