Saritha Achar

Experience

• 

  Wipro

  Jan 2000 - Jan 2003

  Senior System Engineer

  Developed new modules and maintained software built to assist clients in the management of their software projects. • Redesigned, implemented and successfully deployed the review process module of iPAT. This led to positive feedback and increased usage of the module. • Received companywide recognition via the “feather in my cap” award for my contributions in software development, particularly the review module within iPAT software. • Conducted training for internal clients on the usage of iPAT leading to significant decrease in support questions regarding navigation and usage.Environment: Microsoft ASP, JavaScript, MSSQL Show less

• 

  BlackRock

  Aug 2005 - May 2010

  Quality Engineering Lead

  Managed a large project portfolio at Barclays and through Blackrock’s 2009 acquisition, requiring significant stakeholder management and cross-functional collaboration. • Drove the QA team from 0% automated coverage to 100% automated coverage of all market data loaders feeding into Calypso.• Achieved efficiency and speed in our regression cycles by configuring all automated tests to execute in continuous integration environment. • Completed automated REST API test coverage as they were built by training 3+ QA engineers in the use of test automation tools such as Fitness to build automated coverage. • Built transparency into several quality-related metrics such as code coverage, code complexity, performance metric etc. by setting up a dashboard in Concerto.Environment: Java, Oracle, Fitnesse, SilkTest, Cruise Control, Concerto, Junit, Jtest, Clover Show less

• 

  Moody's

  May 2010 - Apr 2021

  Managed team for QA and test automation for Business Unit with a product portfolio of over ~$100M in revenue. Established an environment of continuous improvement.• Trained, coached and promoted multiple QA engineers into senior technical roles and team lead positions.• Led smooth adoption of Single Sign-On (SSO) for multiple products with detailed test strategy and test plan, methodical and systematic testing of the migration of client organization information and test accounts.• Established reliable and consistent REST API test framework for accuracy of new country models. • Supported large infrastructure project to migrate multiple products from on-premises servers to AWS. Identified and provided insights on performance issues and assisted with fine tuning of AWS configuration by repeated regression testing of REST APIs for increased confidence.Environment: Selenium web driver, Java, TestNG, MSTest, C#, JMeter, SQLServer, Jira, Confluence, Jenkins, CircleCI, AWS, AngularJS, Angular 2.0, Dockers Show less Delivered multiple successful releases for a new product suite in an agile development environment by quickly ramping knowledge on existing test coverage, test planning, identifying gaps and communicating risks. Responsible for managing the manual, API and UI test automation resources.• Restructured QA team, with no headcount increase, to manage new products added to the portfolio and accelerate development of automated test coverage.• Provided strategic management, test planning and QA for new product with predominantly middle eastern consumers in an agile development environment. This was among the fastest growing and profitable products at the company with more than 30 clients and $15M in revenue.• Developed proposal to secure QA engineer contractors to meet upcoming business needs, freeing existing seasoned engineers to upskill new hires. • Delivered UI testing for a critical 2-year project to upgrade multiple products from Adobe Flash to AngularJS and Angular 2. Worked with team on detailed test strategy and creation of dependable automated UI test suites for subsequent UI regression testing.• Accomplished delivery of unique special projects for high-value customers by creating instances of the product on AWS to manage high-volume requests. The client needed to run portfolios with 5 million instruments and deliver results within a day. Became fluent with the use of AWS, understanding of dynamic scaling, performance and load testing. Environment: Selenium web driver, Java, TestNG, MSTest, C#, SQLServer, Jira, Confluence, Jenkins Show less Hired, developed and managed a team, both offshore and onsite, for Business Unit with large, complex project portfolio and annual budget of ~$1M.• Saved $20,000/year for the unit by realigning existing resources and hiring new members. • Covered technical debt and the lack of automated test coverage for our API by establishing a successful offshore engagement. The test coverage for API went from 0% to 40%.• After securing BU adoption, trained both offshore and onsite QA engineering resources on a new BDD tool.• Weeded out data related bugs across the universe of portfolio and loans by rolling out data-driven Selenium scripts for various widgets of web-based data portal.• Built efficient reliable software development processes by defining best practices for new product development starting from requirements management, test planning to release and maintenance. • Covered gaps in technical documentation by hiring technical writer. Built efficiencies in build & release management by managing and hiring build and release engineers.Environment: Selenium web driver, Java, JMeter, GreenPepper, Oracle, Jira, Confluence, Jenkins Show less

  • Director Software Quality Engineering

    Mar 2019 - Apr 2021

  • Sr. Quality Engineering Manager

    Apr 2016 - Mar 2019

  • Quality Engineering Manager

    May 2010 - Apr 2016
• 

  Ripple

  Sept 2021 - now

  Manage a high performing team of software infrastructure engineers whose mission it is to develop self service tools for Ripple engineers so that they are empowered to build/deploy with speed and confidence. Ensure clear and accurate observability of internally hosted developer tools. Implement cost effective, secure, compliant and highly available tooling. Coach, mentor and support team members to up-skill and meet their career goals. • Led the roll out of self service tooling for developer requesting access to vault paths. Support for test & production vaults leveraging existing toolsets along with building out go application for back end provisioning. • Drove the deployment of FIPS Level 2+ compliant solution to meet customer needs across all instances of Vault. • Supported the implementation of vault namespaces to meet security and compliance needs along with enabling autonomy for engineering teams to self manage vault permissions. • Guided the team in the adoption of a new team charter & knowledge transitions, from old charter to new charters.• Accelerated the knowledge building for the team by supporting in on-call schedules and servicing of high volume infrastructure requests from developers. • Structured career conversations and goal setting for all team members to grow their profiles & experience. Show less Manage a high performing team of engineering productivity & performance engineers who’s mission it is to develop tools and automation for engineers to build, test and deploy with ease and confidence. Support global cross border payments network product using the power of XRP/XRPL. Implement a reliable and performing CI/CD pipeline leading to faster upgrades of application micro services to production systems. Coach, mentor and support team members to up-skill and meet their career goals. • Drove the effort for the creation of dedicated environments in performance testing with collaboration of DevOps and Infra teams • Achieved 60% reduction in gitlab pipeline durations of monolithic product by optimizing for parallel execution of jobs and removing unnecessary ones. • Drove and supported the development of a modern light-weight test framework for adoption by developers to easily create end to end test coverage. • Modernized the execution of pipeline tests from legacy infrastructure to containerization in Kubernetes.• Identified opportunities to streamline and reduce redundancies in SDLC. • Supported testing of high transactions per second (TPS) for specific customer needs and enabling corridors for their projected high transaction volumes.• Brought transparency to existing functional test coverage for product managers, identified gaps and prioritized projects to address the gaps.Environment: Hashicorp Vault, Java, Postgres, Python, Kubernetes, Locus, Gitlab, ArgoCD, Artifactory, AWS, Datadog, Prometheus, Grafana, Lighthouse, Kinesis, Jira, Confluence Show less

  • Manager Infrastructure Engineering

    Jan 2024 - now

  • Engineering Manager, Engineering Productivity & Performance Engineering

    Sept 2021 - Dec 2023