Varun Venkata Krishnan

Director Of Engineering

• Built a world class 160 member Engineering practice at Chennai that is responsible for end to end product development, support and maintenance.
• Worked closely with executive leadership to set strategic goals and define direction for the organization
• Helped create and manage a comprehensive training framework for training the engineering teams on existing products, new technologies and processes
• Helped design and rollout a cloud strategy that involved re-architecting legacy applications for the cloud and move from physical hardware to an AWS cloud environment.
• Designed & rolled out Scaled Agile Framework (SAFe) for the Chennai engineering organization.
• Guided engineering teams in the development of IP for new solutions offerings, which helped Flatirons customers efficiently manage specific and critical content.

Customer Support Manager

• Designed and implemented a global customer support model - this required liaising across Product Management, Delivery, Accounting and Infrastructure teams.
• Was responsible for setting up the customer support team from scratch at Chennai (budgeting, hiring, infrastructure setup, etc).
• Led a team of 17 Support Specialists and Customer Advocates spread across the globe; daily responsibilities include prioritizing, allocating tasks, monitoring performance and ensuring adequate training & mentoring for the team.
• Managing customer relationship through regular interactions to gather feedback and set expectations.
• Preparing dashboards and management reports to track key performance indicators for monitoring SLA compliance, on-time delivery, quality, budget, etc.

Support Manager (Client: KeyBank)

• End to end IT application management activities for a group of applications dealing with retail loans and liabilities – this included involvement in enterprise IT systems planning, managing support operations and delivery of minor enhancements.
• Monitored and streamlined work on incoming incident, problem and support requests.
• Acted as primary contact for escalation in case of SLA slippages or end-user complaints.
• Quantitative application availability measurement, monitoring and reporting.
• Conducted periodic status reviews with business teams and other IT teams on the current status of activities being performed.

Transition Manager (Client: AIG Japan)

• Managed transition and offshoring of Application Development and Maintenance activities for a Japanese subsidiary that was being integrated with AIG Japan
• Worked on streamlining business user support, incident/problem management, delivery of enhancements along with process changes to align the IT operations of the subsidiary with global ITSM standards
• Played a key role in roll-out of ServiceNow, a tool now used across the organization to streamline IT Service Management processes.
• Developed a capable onshore team to handle support activities through hiring, training and coaching them.
• Interacted frequently with the stakeholders to apprise them of the status, escalate critical issues and mitigate risk.

Operations Lead (Client: AXA Bank)

• Restructured the production support processes to enhance 24*7 support capability. Created a new offshore support team after identifying the resourcing requirements, working with the client teams and other teams internally to define responsibilities for the team; developed processes and metrics; trained and mentored the new team to deliver support of highest quality.
• Led technical support, incident management and other operational activities for IT applications handling assets, liabilities and other critical applications of AXA Bank.
• Monitored and streamlined work on incoming incident, problem and support requests
• Interacted frequently with the stakeholders to apprise them of the status, escalate critical issues and mitigate risk.
• Led ITSM training for support team members - this led to all 8 members of the offshore team being ITIL Foundation certified.

Application Support Lead (Client: AXA Bank)

• Managed software development and release activities for multiple IT applications dealing with critical banking functionality - worked on-site with the client team in Belgium.
• Liaised with multiple customer IT and business teams to define and analyze requirements for releases varying from major enhancements to minor quick fixes. Actively participated in all activities of SDLC ensuring on-time and high quality delivery of releases.
• Worked deriving estimations for release requests and managed task allocation within the team.
• Interacted frequently with the stakeholders to apprise them of the status, escalate critical issues and mitigate risk

Technical Lead (Client: AXA Bank)

• Worked on re-engineering and consolidation of the credit and loan management applications of the bank as part of an ongoing multi-year development project - this project allowed the bank to significantly increase its business offerings.
• Liaised with other IT and business teams to gather requirements and define the technical architecture.
• Performed final reviews of application code and test results before they were delivered to the customer
• Worked on performance tuning of applications to ensure a positive customer experience post project go-live - significant improvements were delivered in a short span of time.

Application Support Engineer (Client: Qwest Wireless)

• Involved in production support and release based maintenance activities for applications supporting the wireless business of Qwest Communications
• Worked on creation of technical design documents, code development and unit/integration testing activities.
• Performed peer reviews of design documentation and code deliverables.
• Doubled up as configuration manager and was responsible for migration & deployment of software changes handled by team.

SSN College of Engineering (Anna University)