Sivashankar Thiyagarajan

India's largest mutual fund RTA. Brought in to lead the technology transformation of a 30-year-old platform into an AI-powered, cloud-native ecosystem — spanning Engineering, Data Engineering, DevSecOps and SRE — and to introduce agentic development as a core engineering practice.

• Built and scaled a 200-member organization across Engineering, Data Engineering, DevSecOps & SRE, with strong leadership layers and an ownership-driven culture.
• Migrated legacy RTA platform to GCP microservices, enabling 10M+ transactions/day with real-time processing and high availability.
• Built and lead the enterprise Data Engineering team — BigQuery, Striim, Dataproc — for real-time analytics and regulatory reporting.
• Championed agentic development as a core engineering practice: built agentic API discovery via MCP over legacy RTA APIs, enabling chat-based interaction with 30 years of platform functionality.
• Created a comprehensive knowledge base from legacy code using AI agents and Obsidian — dramatically accelerating developer onboarding across the 200-member org.
• Deployed agentic workflows for automated pen testing and built a Virtual PMO Agent for real-time internal program status tracking.

Core modernization of Freshworks CRM — transitioning from monolithic architecture to an enterprise-ready, cloud-native SaaS platform.

• Led the transition from a Ruby-on-Rails monolith to Java microservices, unlocking scalability, modular deployments, and cloud portability.
• Institutionalized the SPACE framework and AI-assisted test automation — +40% release throughput, −30% production defects.
• Restructured 50-member team into domain-driven squads; strengthened the engineering leadership bench through hands-on mentorship.
• Partnered with Product and GTM teams to align the roadmap to enterprise-readiness and SLAs for global-scale deployment.

Built Pine Labs' entire online payments business from the ground up — transitioning the company from offline POS to a multi-channel digital payments platform.

• Grew Payment Gateway from ₹10 Cr to ₹4,000+ Cr GTV/month in under 12 months; built and led a 75-member engineering organization from scratch.
• Re-architected legacy platform from 10 TPS to 250 TPS (25×), with cloud-native microservices on AWS capable of 1,000+ TPS.
• Launched Tokenization, EMI Affordability (scaled to 100 TPS), Payouts, and Subscriptions as new merchant value-added services, opening multiple revenue lines.
• Embedded SRE practices, GitOps CI/CD, and full-stack observability with Terraform, OpenTelemetry, New Relic, and PagerDuty.
• CEO's Award — Employee of the Year.

Seven-year tenure leading technical architecture for mission-critical payment infrastructure inside a global engineering organization. Owned architecture decisions across both acquiring and issuing rails.

• Built the Payments Switch from scratch to handle ~2.5M transactions/day with high reliability across global markets.
• Designed and implemented the Tokenization stack for inbound debit card transactions, enabling secure Card-on-File (CoF) functionality and PCI compliance.
• Built direct connectors for Visa, Mastercard, Omnipay, and CUP — expanding payment coverage and network resilience.
• Improved transaction success rates by 50 bps via circuit-breaker routing, translating to tens of thousands of additional daily transactions.
• Deployed reactive RxJava-based stack, significantly improving system scalability and throughput.
• Critical Talent Award.