SAMUEL BOPPURI
Fairfax,VA
Summary
Technical Program Manager & Release Train Engineer with 09+ years of experience delivering high-value programs in healthcare domain. Proven track record of leading Agile and SAFe transformations across multiple Agile Release Trains (ARTs), optimizing value flow, and coaching teams to deliver predictable outcomes. Skilled at collaborating with business stakeholders, product and technology leaders to align roadmaps with strategic goals, facilitate PI planning, and drive continuous improvement. Strong servant-leadership philosophy, adept at conflict resolution, mentoring and fostering a culture of accountability and transparency.
Overview
10
10
years of professional experience
1
1
Certification
Work History
Technical Program Manager / Release Train Engineer
UnitedHealth Group
08.2015 - Current
- Directed end-to-end program delivery for high-impact healthcare data analytics platforms serving 5M+ members, collaborating with global teams and C-level stakeholders.
- Championed the adoption of SAFe Agile across multiple portfolios, increasing program velocity by 35% and reducing time-to-market.
- Improved overall PI predictability and delivery cadence across ARTs by 25% through coaching, metrics analysis and continuous improvement workshops.
- Facilitated PI Planning Readiness and executed up to 5 Program Increment planning events per year (virtual and in-person) for ARTs of 125+ members, using Aha! to define vision, roadmap, and SMART PI objectives.
- Chaired Scrum of Scrums and ART Sync sessions to identify dependencies, remove impediments and align deliverables across 10+ teams; improved average team velocity by 3–5 story points per PI.
- Implemented ROAM-based risk and issue management, focusing on compliance and data security risks, decreased high-priority risk resolution time by 30%.
- Guided teams in adopting CI/CD and secure DevOps practices and reduced release cycle time by 20% while maintaining compliance.
- Mentored cross-functional teams in story decomposition (INVEST), backlog prioritization using MoSCoW and Kano techniques, and estimation techniques (Planning Poker, T-shirt sizing); improved forecasting accuracy and team velocity by 15%.
- Built a community of practice to share best practices, mentored new team members to SAFe certification, and fostered servant leadership and psychological safety across distributed teams.
Education
Master of Science - Electrical Engineering
California State University Northridge
Bachelor of Technology - Electronics and Communications Engineering
Karunya University
Skills
- SAFe Program & Release Train Management (RTE, SPC, Scrum Master)
- Agile & Hybrid Methodologies (Scrum, Kanban, SAFe)
- Program Increment (PI) Planning, ART Sync & Inspect and Adapt
- Cross-Functional Collaboration & Stakeholder Engagement
- Backlog Prioritization (MoSCoW, Kano) & Story Decomposition (INVEST)
- Value Stream & Flow Metrics (Velocity, Burndown/Burnup, Predictability)
- Issue & Risk Management (ROAM), Continuous Improvement & Retrospectives
- CI/CD & DevOps Practices, Continuous Delivery Pipeline
- Coaching & Mentoring Teams, Servant Leadership
- Tools: CA Agile Central (Rally), Jira, Jira Align, Aha!, MS Project, Confluence, SharePoint, ServiceNow, Azure DevOps, Tableau
Certification
- SAFe Program Consultant (SPC)
- SAFe Release Train Engineer (RTE)
- SAFe Scrum Master (SSM)
- SAFe Product Owner/Product Manager (POPM)
Timeline
Technical Program Manager / Release Train Engineer
UnitedHealth Group
08.2015 - Current
Bachelor of Technology - Electronics and Communications Engineering
Karunya University
Master of Science - Electrical Engineering
California State University Northridge
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