About

Vikram Ramakrishnan

Iโ€™m an effective technology leader with over 2 decades of experience and proven abilities in driving organizational transformation, building high-performance engineering teams and delivering customer value through technology. I have full stack software engineering expertise specializing in designing, building, and scaling large-scale distributed systems in the FinTech space and I thrive in dynamic, fast-paced environments with a strong focus on results.

Career Highlights

  • Built Platform services center of Excellence in India from scratch with over 45 Engineers and 6 Engineering managers.
  • Led technical strategy for multiple platform modernization efforts (Tracking Infrastructure, Notifications, Crawler) removing operational inefficiencies and improving scalability and security posture.
  • Proven track record of building high performance engineering teams by hiring, retaining and growing talent across geographies.
  • Reduced nearly 30% Opex by executing Location strategy initiative for Foundational Platforms organization.

Work Experience

PayPal Inc.

15 yrs 6 mos


Head of Engineering, Foundational Platforms

Oct 2023 – Present

๐‚๐ฎ๐ฌ๐ญ๐จ๐ฆ๐ž๐ซ ๐๐จ๐ญ๐ข๐Ÿ๐ข๐œ๐š๐ญ๐ข๐จ๐ง๐ฌ ๐๐ฅ๐š๐ญ๐Ÿ๐จ๐ซ๐ฆ (Email, SMS, Push Notifications, WhatsApp, Paper & Merchant Notifications)

  • Orchestrate 200M+ omni-channel last mile notifications per day for all PayPal business units
  • End to End analytics and Insights on Cloud, enabling faster business decisions, improving customer engagement and regulatory compliance

๐Œ๐š๐ง๐š๐ ๐ž๐ ๐…๐ข๐ฅ๐ž ๐“๐ซ๐š๐ง๐ฌ๐Ÿ๐ž๐ซ / ๐’๐ž๐œ๐ฎ๐ซ๐ž ๐ƒ๐š๐ญ๐š ๐„๐ฑ๐œ๐ก๐š๐ง๐ ๐ž

  • Multi protocol, Low latency and scalable data exchange platform implementing end to end encryption with comprehensive access controls ensuring compliance with strict financial regulations.
  • Enable DLP (Data Leak Prevention) to protect sensitive customer data across all file transfer operations

๐€๐๐๐ซ๐ž๐ฌ๐ฌ ๐๐จ๐ซ๐ฆ๐š๐ฅ๐ข๐ณ๐š๐ญ๐ข๐จ๐ง ๐๐ฅ๐š๐ญ๐Ÿ๐จ๐ซ๐ฆ

  • Developed a robust platform to Standardize/Normalize addresses, thereby enhancing risk assessment capabilities, ensuring regulatory compliance, mitigating fraud risks, and achieving auth rate improvements.
  • Improve deliverability by providing low latency services that process over 70M+ requests/ day across PayPal and its adjacencies.

๐„๐ง๐ญ๐ž๐ซ๐ฉ๐ซ๐ข๐ฌ๐ž ๐–๐ž๐› ๐‚๐ซ๐š๐ฐ๐ฅ๐ž๐ซ

  • Empower business teams to extract actionable insights from web data, facilitating critical functions such as Seller Risk Identification, Detect/Mitigate fraud, and Payment Parity assessment.
  • Patented Guided Crawl infrastructure, empowering teams to tailor crawl direction for enhanced, human-like interaction with websites.

๐‚๐š๐ฌ๐ž ๐Œ๐š๐ง๐š๐ ๐ž๐ฆ๐ž๐ง๐ญ & ๐„๐ง๐ญ๐ž๐ซ๐ฉ๐ซ๐ข๐ฌ๐ž ๐ƒ๐จ๐œ๐ฎ๐ฆ๐ž๐ง๐ญ ๐Œ๐š๐ง๐š๐ ๐ž๐ฆ๐ž๐ง๐ญ ๐๐ฅ๐š๐ญ๐Ÿ๐จ๐ซ๐ฆ

  • Enable customizable front office/back office case management system reducing TTM & AHT and improving Opex efficiency.
  • Facilitate management of over 2B documents, 30+ client integrations, enhancing security and regulatory compliance.

Director of Engineering, Enterprise Platform Services

Nov 2019 – Oct 2023

Led Engineering for PayPal’s enterprise platforms like Notifications, Secure Data Exchange & Web Crawler.


Senior Manager, Engineering, Search & Tracking Platforms

Mar 2017 – Nov 2019 (2 yrs 9 mos)

I led Engineering for Search & Behavioral Analytics Platform at Paypal and was responsible for the overall vision, strategy, and execution.


Engineering Manager, Behavioral Analytics & Tracking Platforms

Mar 2013 – Mar 2017 (4 yrs 1 mos)

  • Responsible for Technology strategy and execution for the team that enabled Behavioural Analytics at scale in PayPal.
  • Enabled Real-time Analytics using Druid that eventually replaced third-party proprietary visual analytics tools, reducing cost and improving TTM for the customers.

Senior Software Engineer, Behavioral Analytics & Tracking Platforms

Apr 2010 – Mar 2013 (3 yrs)

  • Lead Engineer on Paypal’s Behavioral Analytics Platform, and responsible for the design and development of systems that processed Tracking Data scaling up to multiple billions of events per day.
  • Domain Lead for Marketing Platforms (Ad Targeting & Tracking) providing home grown Campaign Management, Ad Targeting & Tracking and Conversion Analytics.

Software Engineer

Oct 2008 – Mar 2010 (1 yr 6 mos)

  • I built foundational User Domain Services for PayPal, refactoring and rewriting massively tangled pieces of legacy monolith code into microservices architectureโ€ข I built foundational User Domain Services for PayPal, refactoring and rewriting massively tangled pieces of legacy monolith code into microservices architecture .

Bestbuy

2005 – 2008 (3 yrs)


Software Engineer
  • Lead engineer on the Customer Relationship Management (CRM) team and built BestBuyโ€™s Loyalty system.
  • Built High volume ETL solutions enabling customer segmentation and prospect Identification.

Tata Consultancy Services

2003 – 2005 (2 yrs)


Assistant System Engineer
  • Worked on the Database Platforms team identifying performance bottlenecks and tuning mission-critical queries for BestBuy’s Data warehousing systems.
  • Built High volume ETL solutions enabling customer segmentation and prospect Identification.