⚡ Open to VP / SVP / CTO / Director Roles

Ashok Kr. Pandey

VP / SVP / CTO / Director — Technology  |  Platform Engineering, GCC & COE Leadership, Digital Transformation

With over 15 years of experience across fintech, e-commerce, travel, and hospitality, Ashok is a tech leader at the forefront of Agentic AI and intelligent operations — building autonomous, self-healing systems that reduce toil and accelerate delivery at scale. He architects end-to-end AIOps pipelines that harness AI for predictive incident detection, root cause analysis, and automated remediation across AWS, Azure, and GCP.

Ashok's approach to DevSecOps is deeply proactive — embedding security as an AI-augmented layer across the entire CI/CD lifecycle, from code commit to production. He integrates GenAI agents into platform engineering workflows to enforce policy-as-code, surface vulnerabilities in real time, and ensure global regulatory compliance without slowing delivery velocity.

Recognized for blending MLOps, observability, and autonomous decision-making into scalable cloud-native platforms, Ashok consistently bridges the gap between cutting-edge AI capabilities and tangible business outcomes — transforming reactive operations into intelligent, self-optimizing ecosystems. Regularly the senior-most technical voice in board, investor, and C-level conversations — translating platform strategy, architecture trade-offs, and cloud economics into measurable business outcomes.

🤖 Agentic AI
Autonomous workflows & GenAI agents
⚙ AIOps
Predictive ops & auto-remediation
🛡 DevSecOps
AI-augmented security in CI/CD
☁ Multi-Cloud
AWS · Azure · GCP
📈 MLOps & Observability
Data platforms & model ops
📋 Compliance
Global regulatory standards
★ GenAI & Agentic AI ★ AIOps / MLOps Multi-Cloud AWSGCPAzure GCC & COE Leadership ITIL Certified Azure Solutions Architect Expert Open to Relocation
AK

Ashok Kr. Pandey

Director Engineering · Delhi / NCR, India

15+
Years in IT
75+
Team Size Led
10K+
B2B Clients
50+
Countries Supported
$20–25M
Annual Technology Budget Owned
ITIL Certified Azure Expert MSc IT

Why C-Suite & Boards Engage Ashok

Combining deep technical architecture with board-level financial acumen — a rare profile that bridges engineering and business leadership.

💵 FinOps & Budget Leadership

💰

$20–25M Budget Ownership

Full P&L accountability for annual technology budgets — cloud infrastructure, tooling, vendor contracts, and headcount — with consistent cost optimisation at scale.

📈

60% OpEx Reduction via AI

Reduced operational engineering headcount from 50 to 20 through Agentic AI adoption and automation — maintaining and improving reliability while dramatically lowering cost-to-serve.

Cloud FinOps & Cost Governance

Drove cloud cost reduction through infrastructure consolidation, right-sizing, reserved capacity planning, and shared infrastructure strategies — achieving significant savings while scaling customer base.

📋

SaaS Metrics Fluency

Deep command of MRR, ARR, LTV, CAC, Churn, and unit economics — enabling data-led investment decisions at both engineering and business leadership levels.

🌎

GCC & COE Leadership

Built and scaled Global Capability Centre operations and a Centre of Excellence for cloud platform engineering, spanning multiple geographies and regulated FinTech/Banking B2B products globally.

🏆

Board & Investor Engagement

Regularly the senior-most technical voice in board, investor, and C-level conversations — translating platform strategy, architecture trade-offs, and cloud economics into business outcomes.

🛠

Hands-On Architectural Depth

Stays actively involved in architecture, solution design, and technical reviews — deep in Kubernetes/CNCF, API/integration platforms (Kong, Kafka, Redis), and cloud-native engineering.

🤖

AI-Led Digital Transformation

Pioneered Agentic DevOps and AIOps — deploying AI agents to autonomously handle incident detection, self-healing, alert triage, and routine CloudOps — transforming reactive operations into intelligent ecosystems.

👑

Org Design & Talent Leadership

Track record of building platform teams from the ground up, growing engineers into senior practitioners, and reshaping org structure around AI-augmented ways of working and cross-skilling programmes.

🔒

Security & Compliance at Scale

Owns end-to-end security posture — WAF, secrets management, RBAC/IAM, DevSecOps, SAST/DAST — driving SOC2, ISO 27001, PCI-DSS, and GDPR readiness across global multi-tenant platforms.

AI & Agentic Innovation

Hands-on builder and architect of AI-powered platforms — from Agentic workflows to data intelligence systems that changed company fortunes.

🤖

Agentic AI Applications

Built production-grade Agentic AI apps using LLM orchestration, RAG pipelines, and multi-agent frameworks. Transformed legacy monolith applications into modern AI-native platforms. Deployed Agentic AI to autonomously handle incident detection, self-healing, and routine CloudOps tasks.

LangChainLangGraphAutoGenCrewAIOpenAIClaudeCodexCursorVercel AIGitHub Copilot
📈

AI-Powered Data & Insights Platform

Architected a landmark data intelligence platform delivering product usage, marketing, and account health insights — praised by C-suite, investors, and board members. Credited with changing the company's strategic direction and fortune.

SnowflakedbtBigQueryMicrosoft FabricTableauPower BILooker

AIOps & Intelligent Monitoring

Implemented AIOps practices using DORA metrics and AI-assisted observability. Integrated Datadog, Hatica and NewRelic with ML-driven anomaly detection for proactive incident prevention and SLI/SLO-driven reliability reporting.

DatadogHaticaDORA MetricsSLIs/SLOsML Anomaly Detection
💡

GenAI Modernization

Led monolith-to-microservices transformation with GenAI augmentation — embedding LLMs into developer workflows, automated code review, intelligent CI/CD and self-healing pipelines.

GitHub CopilotCursorVercel AICodexLLM CI/CDMLOpsVector DBsPrompt Eng.
📊

Business Intelligence & Analytics AI

Built BI platforms from ground up integrating AI for predictive analytics, executive dashboards, SaaS metrics (MRR, ARR, LTV, CAC, Churn) and revenue forecasting aligned to P&L goals.

RedshiftData LakeETL/ELTPredictive ML
🛠

AI-Driven DevSecOps

Integrating AI into security posture management — automated compliance checks for SOC2, PCI-DSS, ISO 27001, GDPR using intelligent policy-as-code, SAST/DAST pipelines and AI-assisted vulnerability remediation.

ArgoCDTerraformPolicy-as-CodeAI Security ScansSASTDAST

Business Impact

Translating cloud, data and AI investments into quantifiable business outcomes that matter at board level.

75+
Engineers led across DevOps, Cloud, DBA globally supporting many different Geo location Teams
60%
OpEx reduction — headcount cut from 50 to 20 engineers via Agentic AI & automation, reliability improved
$20–25M
Annual technology budget owned — cloud infrastructure, tooling, vendor contracts & headcount
99.9%
SLA uptime maintained across 10,000+ B2B client SaaS products globally
50+
Countries supported for FinTech CloudOps: India, Kenya, Singapore, Vietnam, Ghana, Malaysia, UK, US and more
10K+
B2B clients served globally across hospitality, travel and FinTech SaaS platforms

🏆 Landmark Achievement — Transforming DevOps, SRE & CloudOps, Data Platform with AI Intelligence

Designed and delivered an AI-powered data and insights platform that provided the company's C-suite with unprecedented visibility into product usage patterns, marketing performance, and account health metrics. The platform leveraged modern data stack technologies (dbt, Snowflake, Microsoft Fabric, cloud-native warehousing) with AI-driven analytics to surface actionable intelligence. The insights generated were credited by executive leadership — including board members and investors — with changing the company's strategic direction: a landmark contribution that directly influenced revenue growth, client retention strategy, and go-to-market decisions.

Pioneered zero-downtime build and deployment pipelines across multi-cloud environments — eliminating release risk through blue-green deployments, canary releases and fully automated rollback strategies. Concurrently architected AI-based infrastructure auto-provisioning and intelligent auto-scaling systems using ML-driven demand forecasting, enabling infrastructure to self-heal and scale in real time without human intervention — reducing deployment lead times dramatically and cutting infrastructure costs through right-sizing.

Professional Experience

15+ years of progressive leadership across Engineering, Cloud, DevOps, Data and Executive Technology.

Leapwork India Pvt Ltd
Director Engineering / Head – DevOps & Cloud Platform
May 2024 – Present
Accountable for end-to-end technology strategy, product engineering, and platform engineering for a global AI automation SaaS product organisation operating as an India engineering hub; regularly presents platform strategy and investment outcomes to board and investor stakeholders.
  • Pioneered Agentic DevOps and AIOps — deploying AI agents to autonomously handle incident detection, self-healing, alert triage, and routine CloudOps tasks.
  • 60% reduction in operational headcount (50 → 20 engineers) through AI-driven automation — maintaining and improving reliability while lowering cost-to-serve.
  • Own full technology budget, investment prioritisation, and vendor relationships; engage board and investor stakeholders with clear technology strategy and ROI narrative.
  • Leading modernisation of legacy monoliths to microservices as part of broader digital transformation programme.
  • Established cross-skilling programmes in AI/ML operations, Agentic DevOps, and cloud-native engineering.
Agentic AIAIOpsMicroservicesDORAHaticaDatadogBudget OwnershipBoard Engagement
Standard Chartered Research & Technology (SC Ventures)
Director Cloud / Head – DevOps
Apr 2023 – May 2024
Led a 75+ person organisation across DevOps, Cloud Security, and DBA functions within a Global Capability Centre (GCC) setting, spanning multiple geographies; built and scaled a Centre of Excellence (COE) for cloud platform engineering across regulated FinTech and Banking B2B products.
  • Set up and scaled a Centre of Excellence (COE) — establishing standardised practices, tooling, and governance adopted across all domain teams.
  • Owned full annual technology budget of approximately USD 20–25M across cloud infrastructure, tooling, vendor contracts, and headcount.
  • Established platform foundations for Kafka, Redis, and Kong API Gateway, standardising integration tooling across all domain teams.
  • Built and enforced security baseline controls (WAF, secrets management, RBAC/IAM) driving SOC2 and ISO 27001 readiness.
  • Owned multi-tenant SaaS infrastructure across 6 countries including access control, tenant isolation, and environment governance.
GCC / COE$20–25M BudgetKongKafkaRedisSOC2ISO 2700175+ Team
Standard Chartered Research & Technology (SC Ventures)
Associate Director / Head – DevOps
Oct 2021 – Mar 2023
Led 50+ person multi-geography DevOps + CloudOps + DBA team on AWS. Delivered cloud and release management automation for all FinTech products across 50+ countries globally.
  • Drove SRE practices — implementing SLIs/SLOs and incident management frameworks for reliability reporting to stakeholders.
  • Built cloud-native platform capabilities using EKS, Terraform/CloudFormation, and ArgoCD for GitOps-based deployments.
  • Established platform observability stack: Datadog, New Relic, Prometheus, Grafana with standardised dashboards and alerting.
SRE / SLIs / SLOsEKSArgoCDGitOpsMulti-Geo50+ Countries
RateGain Travel Technology
Sr. Manager DevOps & Cloud Infrastructure
Apr 2018 – Oct 2021
Led 25–30 person DevOps and Cloud team supporting SaaS products for 10,000+ B2B hospitality and travel clients globally.
  • Owned CI/CD pipeline implementation across AWS/GCP/Azure hybrid infrastructure — system scaling, app performance tuning, and 99.9% SLA uptime.
  • Drove cloud cost reduction through shared infrastructure consolidation, capacity discipline, and right-sizing while growing customer base.
  • Led Oracle-to-MySQL/PostgreSQL migration — ETL design, data validation, and cutover readiness.
SaaSCI/CDMulti-Cloud10K+ ClientsFinOpsDB Migration
RateGain Travel Technology
Manager Technology
Jul 2016 – Mar 2018
Maintained 99.9% SLA across multi-product SaaS platform; implemented CI/CD across AWS, GCP, Azure, and on-premise. Onboarded development teams to CI/CD pipelines and integrated automated functional and performance testing.
99.9% SLAJenkinsMulti-CloudCI/CD
Earlier Career (2009 – 2016)
Sr. DBA · Asst. Manager IT · DBA · Database Analyst · IT Trainee
2009 – 2016
Progressive career across Indian Oil Corporation, iEnergizer (CreditOne Bank USA, EA Sports, British Telecom), Levitate Mobile Technologies (Domino's Global, NDTV, Religare), CHANGEYOURBOSS.COM (IT Head, 75-person team), and V-factor Media Solutions — covering DBA, data warehousing, ETL and DevOps foundations.
Oracle DBAETLData WarehousingIT Leadership

Technical Skills

A comprehensive multi-cloud, multi-tool engineering leader spanning AI, data, DevOps and infrastructure.

AI & Machine Learning

LangChainLangGraphAutoGenCrewAIOpenAIClaudeCodexCursorVercel AIGitHub CopilotRAG PipelinesVector DBsMLOpsAIOpsPrompt Engineering

Cloud Platforms

Multi-Cloud AzureAzure SQLElastic PoolAKSAzure App ServiceAzure FunctionsAzure Service BusAzure API ManagementAzure MonitorAzure DevOpsAzure CDNAzure VNet AWSEKSECSFargateLambdaEC2RDSS3CloudFrontRoute 53SQS / SNSAPI GatewayVPCIAM GCPGKECloud RunCloud SQLCloud SpannerCloud StorageCloud ArmorCloud DNS TerraformCloudFormationPulumiHelmKubernetesDocker

API, Integration & Platform Eng.

Kong API GatewayKafkaRedisRabbitMQSelf-service IDPPlatform-as-ProductDeveloper ExperienceService Mesh

Data & Analytics

Azure Synapse AnalyticsAzure Data FactoryAzure Data LakeAzure DatabricksMicrosoft FabricHDInsightsSSIS / SSASAzure Stream Analytics BigQueryBigtableGCP DataflowGCP Pub/SubLooker StudioGCP Dataproc AWS EMRAWS RedshiftAWS GlueAWS AthenaKinesis SnowflakeDatabricksdbtKafkaHadoopHiveHBaseElasticSearchRedisCassandra

Business Intelligence

TableauPower BILookerSSRSOracle BIMRR / ARR / LTVCAC / ChurnP&L ForecastingExecutive Dashboards

SRE & Observability

SLIs / SLOs / SLAsIncident ManagementDatadogNew RelicAppDynamicsPrometheusGrafanaELK StackHaticaNagiosZabbixCloudwatchSumo Logic

DevOps & CI/CD

Azure DevOpsJenkinsArgoCDGitHub ActionsGitLab CITeamcityOctopus DeployBitBucketDockerKubernetes

Security & Compliance

SOC2PCI-DSSISO 27001GDPRDevSecOpsSASTDASTIAMRBACWAFZero TrustSecrets ManagementPolicy-as-Code

FinOps & Executive Leadership

Cloud Cost OptimisationBudget ManagementVendor ManagementBuild vs BuyOKRsDORA MetricsRoadmap OwnershipBoard EngagementGCC / COE SetupP&L Ownership

Databases

OracleMySQLPostgreSQLSQL ServerMongoDBCassandraDocumentDBSybase

Get in Touch

Open to VP / SVP / CTO / Director-level conversations around Platform Engineering, GCC/COE Leadership, AI and Cloud strategy.

📞
🔗
📍

Location

Delhi / NCR, India (Open to Relocation / 30–40% Travel)

Open to Opportunities

I partner with organizations looking to harness AI, Cloud and Data to create competitive advantage. Whether it's setting up a GCC/COE, building a platform from scratch, scaling engineering culture, turning data into strategic insight, achieving zero-downtime deployments through full CI/CD automation, or implementing AI-driven infrastructure auto-provisioning and intelligent auto-scaling — let's explore what's possible.

Target Roles: VP · SVP · CTO · Director Technology  |  FinTech · SaaS · Travel · Hospitality · E-commerce