Technical Program Manager

Vijay Kamal

408-***-**** • *********@*****.***

Technical Program Manager with over 10 years of experience leading end-to-end product development and release management at an object-oriented database company. Recognized as its most valuable employee for 12 years, with a proven ability to align engineering execution with strategic business and product goals. SUMMARY OF ACCOMPLISHMENTS AND CORE STRENGTHS

Technical Program Management: Directed the programs that modernized Objectivity’s database, which expanded it to more markets, including enterprise software and big data. Increased engineering productivity by over 200%.

Product Strategy & Roadmap: Partnered with product, engineering, and business leaders to define product vision, align roadmap priorities with customer and market needs, and drive strategic decision- making across the product lifecycle.

Release Management and Software Process Management: Enabled a 4x increase in the frequency of product builds. Completely overhauled DevOps (including containerization, more test coverage, and more code reviews), and built the CI/CD pipelines. Increased both test execution and test pass rates by >80%, and reduced regression testing and bug resolution time from days to hours. Saved more than 70% annually by leading the migration of product development to the cloud. Transitioned the company from Waterfall to Agile.

User Experience: Enabled customer renewals at Objectivity to rise from around 70% to over 95%, and led creation of its first full GUI. Liaised with clients throughout the product lifecycle, and led development of customized features. Also worked as a technical support manager.

Leadership: Hired and trained QA, release, and technical support engineers, and created infrastructures and processes that enabled them to efficiently collaborate. Established KPIs across development, builds, and QA.

Communication: Built a cohesive companywide product development culture, and acted as the central point of contact for stakeholders. Wrote comprehensive program plans, and presented them to C-level management. Developed engineering dashboards in Jira, and established standards for documenting technical programs.

Technical Program Management • Release Management • Risk Management • Stakeholder Management • Change Management • Dependency Management • Continuous Improvement • Software Development Processes • Agile • Waterfall • Scrum • XP • Kanban • Lean Practices • DevOps • CI/CD • Containerization • QA & Test Automation • Release Management • Systems Engineering • Tools & Platforms • Jira • Jenkins • Docker • Gradle • AWS • Linux • Windows • Programming Languages • C++ • Java • Python • DO (a NoSQL Declarative Language like Cypher) • Enterprise Software • Big Data • Collaboration & Reporting • Tableau • Confluence • MS Office Suite PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

Objectivity, Inc., San Jose, CA (Oct 2013–Dec 2023) Director of Technical Program Management, QA, and Release; Vice President of Engineering Operations Played an essential part in expanding the company—best known for its object-oriented database—beyond government and telco clients into enterprise and big data markets. Led modernization of software development processes and collaborated with cross-functional leadership to define strategic product direction and roadmap priorities. Completely overhauled release management processes that enabled 4x faster product releases and improved engineering productivity by >200% without expanding team size.

Shortened the feature development timeline from 6–8 months to 8–10 weeks by transitioning from a pure Waterfall process to hybrid Agile/Waterfall, and then to a mostly Agile process. Also researched, introduced, and set up Jira, Confluence, Git, Jenkins, Docker, and Slack.

Enabled concurrent development of 3 new products with different time sequences by streamlining development processes, introducing and leading regular product roadmap and strategy meetings, and aligning technical efforts with business goals. Prioritized features based on market demand, customer feedback, and competitive analysis.

Decreased build failures by >300% by introducing the first Git branching strategy to manage development of multiple features in separate branches for different products. Avoided code conflicts, and set up isolated build, integration, and testing for features. Also established modular builds.

Transformed the build and release process by implementing CI/CD pipeline FOR parallel builds and tests. Worked with release engineers to set up the pipeline for modularized product development and define feature branches.

Shortened time to set up builds (from at least day to set up a Windows or Unix development environment to a few minutes to set up a new Docker build machine) by introducing containerized builds for development.

Managed development of a scalable ingest feature (pipelining) which increased the data ingest rate for the distributed graph database—enabled ingesting of 1B call data records in just over 30 seconds.

Managed the project that enabled the graph database to satisfy several query requirements. Reduced a path query of 5 degrees from more than an hour to 27 seconds, using a new declarative graph query feature called DO.

Trained the team in Agile methodology, and established systematic processes and report templates for every step (initiation, planning, resource & communication planning, risk assessment & mitigation, design

& development, integration, testing, deployment & release, maintenance, and end of life). Presented Agile to developers with different mindsets (35 years’ experience to new grads), and convinced them to follow it.

Enabled a small team of 3-4 test engineers to test 4–6 features in parallel by prioritizing integration and testing of critical features earlier in the development cycle, accelerating feedback and reducing bottlenecks.

Established a robust unit testing process, including automated verification checks to ensure developers executed tests consistently before code integration, significantly improving code quality and reducing regressions.

Prevented the QA cycles on flawed builds and detected critical bugs early by introducing smoke testing and build promotion for every build to quickly validate it before starting deeper testing.

Improved defect prioritization. Based it on severity, frequency, and impact. Defined criteria for the first time, and introduced processes across the engineering team to set timelines for resolving bugs.

Saved over $1.2M annually by leading the team’s transition from an on-prem datacenter to the cloud during COVID-19. Defined availability, security, and data requirements, and partnered with IT to manage inventory, backups, and redundancy.

Objectivity, Inc., Sunnyvale, & Mountain View, CA (Jul 2009–Oct 2013, Nov 2003–Feb 2008) Technical Support Manager; Manager of Engineering Projects and Technical Support Enabled customer renewals to increase from about 70% to over 95% by improving the customer experience with the company, product, and technical support.

Introduced the database’s first GUI, making it easier for users to access and manage data. Later helped productize it into InfiniteGraph Studio for the big data market.

Led the development of custom feature requests for several Fortune 500 clients.

Took over QA after the manager left, increased test coverage by 60%, and reduced test run time by over 70%. Inherited a homegrown QA framework that was slow, hard to maintain, and difficult for adding new capabilities and features. Implemented an open source framework and expanded test automation for regression, performance, and API testing.

As support manager, cut call volume by 80% and average call duration by more than 90% by implementing a better tracking system, leading the creation of a web-based knowledge base, and establishing analytics for the different call types. Ensured that calls were closed when the bugs were filed.

Built the beta program for product releases. Gave clients beta releases to test ahead of time and make requests.

Prior experience as a technical support engineer at Objectivity and a software development engineer at Siemens Corporation.

EDUCATION

M.S. Engineering, Systems Engineering and Data Science specialization, University of California, Los Angeles, CA (expected in December 2025) B.E., Electrical and Electronics Engineering, First Rank, University of Calicut, India (December 1997) PMI-ACP, Project Management Institute (July 2024)

Machine Learning Specialization, Stanford University & DeepLearning.AI (April 2024) Google Project Management, Professional Certificate (July 2024)

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