PayPal Stories Archive

It takes an army of people to create

 

and maintain the technologies that power the PayPal services we rely on, and we wanted to find out more about the man who leads this team. We recently caught up with Sri Shivananda, PayPal’s Chief Technology Officer, and unofficial leader of its “Geek Squad” to see how he approaches technology.

 

Hi Singapore! My name is Sri Shivananda and I head up what I like to call the Geek Squad here at PayPal (laughs). Essentially, I oversee the team responsible for the company’s secure, reliable and scalable global technology infrastructure and strategic core platform – which is the foundation that enables PayPal to deliver innovative products and services to consumers and merchants all over the world. In my role as Chief Technology Officer, I’m responsible for PayPal’s global technology strategy and committed to building and sustaining a culture where engineers thrive.

 

 

It’s true, I am a geek at heart and I love working with teams across the company to push the boundaries of innovation. I get inspired solving complex problems with creativity and technology. In my role, that means creating value for our customers, and the company, by thoughtfully applying the latest and greatest in technology trends.

 

During my first year of engineering school, my father said to me, "I can either buy you a motorcycle or a computer." Every single one of my friends was buying a motorcycle, and while my heart wanted one, my head said "computer." And so I got a computer and it was so fascinating to me. Soon I was programming in different languages and by my second year of engineering, I had started to make and sell computers. So my passion for technology started when I was fairly young.

 

I wake up at 6:00am and am at work by about 7:30am. I listen to my audiobooks during my commute into the office and once there, start my day off by clearing my email. On most days, my first meeting starts at 8:00am and I spend much of the day in conversations, whiteboard sessions, strategic brainstorms, mentoring and coaching talent both inside and outside my team, and having discussions with customers, vendors and internal partners (which includes my colleagues in Legal, Finance, Human Resources, Compliance and Communications).

 

I’m also in regular review meetings to assess how my teams are performing. I take three 30-minute breaks in the day to catch up on email, walk through the halls and eat lunch. It’s important to stay current on what’s happening, so I connect through many 1:1s with my directs, other team members, peers, other technology leaders in the company, internal customers and more. Occasionally I’ll get involved with a site incident, blameless post-postmortems and other unplanned situations.

 

No matter what, I have at least one technical session every day.

 

 

Depending on that, I go home at about 7:00pm or 10:00pm (if I have a dinner meeting).

 

 

 

We currently run one of the largest internal private financial clouds on Openstack, and are beginning our journey to the public cloud. We’re modernizing the core infrastructure and in doing so, redesigning all aspects: data centers, networks, infrastructure services, middleware, platform services (like monitoring, crawling, notifications, messaging, etc.), developer platforms, quality pipelines and, most important of all, security.

 

We’re leveraging technologies like Docker, Mesos and concepts that make our internal Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) offering compelling and enable our developers to be agile. We’re applying principles of model-driven immutable infrastructure, single source of truth, standardization, automation, observability, resilience and self service. While doing this, we’re also scaling our online and offline data systems to be capable of the extraordinary growth coming at us over the next decade. On top of all the exciting work we’re doing to our technology foundation, we’re supporting teams across the company to launch the next generation of identity, risk, payments, compliance and customer platforms.

 

Within the financial sector, we know there will be more innovation in the next five years than we’ve seen in the last 50 years.

 

 

So we not onlytap into the FinTech ecosystem to develop the best foundation and solutions – such as powering PayPal's ability to send/receive/remit money, pay bills, purchase on millions of merchant sites and reload mobile phones around the world – but also work with the incredible talent within our global PayPal technology centers to constantly innovate for the future. On top of the innovation in the core, we have successfully integrated acquisitions like Bill Me Later, Braintree, Venmo, Paydiant, Xoom, Modest and CyActive. This helps ensure that PayPal continues to succeed as commerce moves into new contexts.

 

I’m very excited about the thriving tech scene in Singapore!

 

The innovation center and three incubating companies within it are working on some cutting-edge technology and solving real-world problems with huge potential. I also had the opportunity to meet with government representatives who are visionary, informed and mindful of how to partner with companies like ours to make a difference not just for Singapore, but for the world.

 

I am a total geek, so I admit that I can’t really without any of my gadgets! :) But if I had to pick just 3 - iPhone, MacBook Air and my Sony Clock Radio that I bought 15 years ago :)

 

I think the following might surprise people (remember, these are not necessarily my favourites)

Audible - I listen to books, I don’t read them

Pedometer - I obsessively check how many steps I’ve walked every day

ClickShare - Pulling a “Tony Stark” by showing the content on my iPhone on monitors at work

 

It’s secure, efficient, affordable.

 

Thanks Sri, for taking the time to share your thoughts with us, it’s been inspiring!