Mahalakshmi Balachandran

I was accountable for the end-to-end delivery and operations for Macy's and Bloomingdale's releases, covering the infrastructure and application. I was also the first point of contact and faceoff with the customers from Macy's business side. Throughout this project, I also did the following:

• Managed all tasks outlined in the statements of work of application development and support projects.
• Supervised and managed the work of the managed services team allocated to the program.
• Reviewed project plans with tasks, schedules, responsibilities, and dependencies developed by the project manager.
• Served as the interface between the customer project managers and Dell's project teams.
• Monitored and ensured on-time deliveries.
• Integrated solutions and strategies within the customer environment based on the analyzed customer goals, objectives, needs, and existing and target systems.
• Leveraged business acumen and subject-matter expertise to provide the best advice and ensure program delivery.
• Prepared and reviewed internal and external kick-off materials—agenda, presentations, summaries—external project status reports, progress reports, and issue and resolution reports.

I managed everything from the discovery phase to the entire SDLC for a portfolio of projects, including integrations, customizations, and enhancements to the eCommerce team. I also did the following:

• Participated and coordinated efforts with operations analysts to execute planning, communication, and project, issue, and change management.
• Established and maintained trusted advisor relationships with client project stakeholders by providing vision and future product roadmapping.
• Created project plans with detailed task distribution using Jira and Confluence.
• Executed projects using Agile and Waterfall methodologies to ensure on-time delivery and exceed customer expectations.
• Managed a deployment project to integrate legacy platforms into GCP.
• Facilitated Agile/Scrum meetings and served as the scrum master using Agile tools like Version One, Jira, and ServiceNow to oversee developers' and vendors' issues and address customer needs and project requirements with a quick turnaround.

I pioneered creating scalable cloud-native and traditional solutions in Java, JEE, and JavaScript with major and diverse international teams. I also did the following:

• Recruited, mentored, retained, and managed the performance of engineers, product managers, and scrum masters.
• Managed and led the creation of Macy's next-generation supply chain products and solutions on GCP.
• Headed a team of 80+ engineers to deliver algorithm-based allocation of products to different stores and integration of merchandise in distribution centers.
• Served as a solutions architect, delivering solutions for moving legacy systems into a microservices architecture.

I managed a team of 14+ engineers covering on and offsite delivery. I directed CI/CD, infrastructure as code, designing and implementing containers, deployment automation, operations and automation, and DevOps enablement. Additionally, I provided product estimations, roadmaps, and the vision for the organization—comprehending business needs and delivering solutions to address obstacles.

As a global technology operations executive, I was accountable for transforming Equifax's operations into a service. This included availability, customer experience, problem, incident, and change management, disaster recovery, business continuity, compliance, monitoring, self-healing and policy-as-code automation, governance, and global, follow-the-sun technology operations centers. I also did the following:

• Oversaw the global technology operations transformation, which was paramount to ensuring the delivery of always-on services and a world-class customer experience.
• Built GCP capabilities to automate repeatable patterns and bring consistency across the whole engineering function for CI/CD, infrastructure, and Google Kubernetes Engine.
• Led efforts to accelerate code to production, with a 5-minute deployment to production model and Agile delivery setup.
• Demonstrated expertise in moving legacy teams into Agile delivery mode and automated pipelines to reduce manual workloads on releases.
• Handled service-level objectives and indicators (SLOs and SLIs), error budgets, and KPIs for services and the cloud.
• Managed cloud security, compliance, and costing.

Served as a platform, data, and applications leader for Equifax's credit-based products, shared services, and regulatory compliance. I implemented InnerSource, ruthless automation, and a microservices-based, API-first, cloud-native, headless (MACH) commerce architecture. I also did the following:

• Incorporated product–customer segmentation techniques to increase business unit bottom-line and consumer enrollment.
• Established data standards and governance processes—ingestion, storage, quality, analysis, data: catalog, classification, protection, and accountability and ownership—aligned to compliance, legal, and business priorities to achieve best-in-class results.
• Strategized a global customer digital identity pattern and a Customer 360 analytics platform. These capabilities reduced data sprawl, improved call center operations efficiency, offered a seamless customer experience across multi-channel touchpoints, and provided actionable KPIs for improving personalization, marketing, and product performance.
• Built a cloud-native data engineering platform for the consumer business unit in GCP.