Paulina Lozano

SurePrep experienced over 25 high-severity production incidents during the peak tax season—70% reported by customers, not internal monitoring. Issues included stuck binders, system lags, and delayed binder processing, leading to client dissatisfaction and operational escalations.

I was brought in to lead a structured remediation program across engineering, service management, and product. My focus was to reduce rework and increase release quality by addressing root causes across five areas:

• DevOps maturity: I hardened GitHub Actions pipelines with rollback procedures, quality gates, and peer review enforcement.
• Observability: I integrated Datadog APM dashboards and alerts for customer-impacting flows.
• Testing discipline: I introduced integration and contract testing gates in CI/CD.
• Change management: I implemented formal change and incident handling processes in ServiceNow, including RCA tracking and release readiness checkpoints.
• Team alignment: I launched sprint planning, DSUs, and backlog refinement sessions across product, service management, and engineering teams.

At Scotiabank, I was brought in to lead a high-impact remediation initiative following a critical failure in the AML systems that resulted in over 200 million financial transactions not being ingested for risk scoring. This created significant regulatory risk and audit exposure, prompting an urgent, multi-stakeholder response.

I led a cross-functional program that delivered 9+ targeted production releases to ingest and reprocess the missing transactions through AML and risk systems. I worked with our cross-functional teams to perform a full root-cause analysis. I established a remediation roadmap to strengthen data ingestion pipelines, streamline ETL handoffs, and enforce upstream/downstream validations.

To reduce future risk, we introduced anomaly detection controls and near-real-time error alerting to catch ingestion failures early. I also aligned AML, data engineering, risk, and compliance teams to define sustainable ingestion processes, SLAs, and audit traceability mechanisms. This effort restored trust with executive stakeholders and regulatory auditors, significantly improved AML data governance, and enabled the bank to meet its compliance obligations with greater operational resilience.

Following SurePrep’s acquisition by Thomson Reuters, I was appointed to lead the full cloud migration of all SurePrep applications and infrastructure from IBM Cloud to the Thomson Reuters Azure tenant, ensuring alignment with enterprise security, compliance, and operational standards.

The effort included migrating development, quality assurance testing, staging, and production environments across critical tax automation apps with complex interdependencies. I led a cross-functional team of 150+ professionals through multiple 3+ month waves of daily working sessions, regression testing, and stakeholder coordination.

I implemented TR-compliant cloud governance, including tagging, identity, and access controls. I also designed and executed detailed cutover and rollback procedures with zero major incidents. I standardized Azure DevOps pipelines to ensure post-migration deployment integrity, managed UAT execution, and secured business sign-offs. The result was a scalable, compliant Azure foundation integrated with TR-wide monitoring and support.

This project involved leading the digital production for the high-profile launch of the Amex Cobalt Card, working under a hard deadline with no room for delays. I collaborated with account directors to oversee the creative development and digital production of ATL and BTL assets across internal and external teams. I secured developer and QA support across multiple departments to meet critical milestones and deliver on time and within budget, supporting the most successful card launch in Amex Canada’s history.

Amex sought to refresh its cardmember onboarding program, which previously relied on over 300 hardcoded emails across 15 card products and 20+ touchpoints. I led the end-to-end production effort and proposed a scalable solution using Salesforce Marketing Cloud. Partnering with engineering and CRM teams, we designed a modular content matrix to dynamically personalize email content based on card type, credit line, and user behavior. This enabled individualized experiences at scale while reducing production time and costs by over 60%.

Cementos Fortaleza is a cement brand that entered the Mexican market in 2012. Our challenge was to connect with those who buy cement by the bag: builders and bricklayers who had long remained loyal to traditional brands.

We began by listening to them. We learned about their resilience, their harsh working conditions under the sun, the risks they take, and their desire to provide better lives for their families. Despite being vital to society, their work often goes unrecognized. We proposed a central idea: believe in the builder’s strength and his power to build a better future. “Fortaleza” means strength, fortitude, and resilience—not just in reference to cement’s durability, but to the character and spirit of those who use it.

I coordinated the interaction between the client and the creative team during the brand’s creation and led production oversight across all campaigns. From radio and TV to on-site filming, I ensured that every piece remained faithful to the brand narrative and guidelines.