Mandar Sangamkar

Leading Technical Program Management group across Qualys responsible to be the voice & health of the products, key initiatives & business goals for all stakeholders.

Key highlights of role -

• Partnered with Executive Leadership to bring visibility & alignment to key strategic initiatives across Engineering, Product & Platform teams.
• Created independent & impartial group of Technical Program Managers with solid software engineering & methodical background to form the foundation of PMO concept.
• Built team of TPMs working horizontally across all products & partnering with key stakeholders (Product, Support, DevOps, SRE, SecOps, Content etc) in the organization.
• Defined, reported & improved KPIs for end to end initiative delivery across multiple functions.
• Defined templates for different purpose driven processes by taking best practices from industry and customizing them to best fit for the organization.
• Built solid frameworks for cross functional dependency, prioritization, Quarterly planning, product iterations, continuous improvements.

• Led end to end Program activities for Qualys Cloud Security group. Defined, tracked & streamlined release cadence, velocity, time to customer KPIs.
• Revamped existing monolithic waterfall process to more frugal & iterative model which resulted into better speed of delivery & also improved quality overall. Tech stack - Java, Cassandra, Redis, Azure, AWS, ELK.
• Built cohesiveness in the team by bringing everyone together to achieve common goal. Built & improved relationships with non-engineering stakeholders to align everyone to big picture.
• Contributed in hiring TPMs for other groups. Helped other groups to fill process gaps as and when needed.

Content Engineering (CE) is one of the key strategic program that serves Avalara’s long term vision of being part of every transaction

in the world. This program consists of two parts – internal projects & customer facing products. As program leader, responsibilities

were distributed across 3 primarily areas : Program leadership, Engineering Deliveries, People / Team Management.

• Program Leadership

• Define program’s and product’s vision by looking at organizational objectives & goals. Define success parameters, milestones & lower level deliverable. Identify correct KPIs, track and report them timely.

• Collaborate with other products, program & stakeholders for effective planning & remove obstacles / risks pro-actively. Help team to keep focus on right priorities.

• Consistently monitor business expectations, find opportunities for automation, efficiency gains & productization. Convert them into engineering deliveries & own end to end execution. Act as an advocate to customer to deliver right solution in midst of volatility.

• Ensure product’s success by working closely with non engineering stakeholder – Sales, Business Dev, Support, Go-live etc.

• Ensure right process / methodologies are in place. Implemented scrum framework, owned product backlog, prioritization, story grooming & scrum ceremonies in initial phase.

• Owned planning & effective utilization of program’s budget (included Team budget, licensing, vendor contracts, other costs etc).

• Led RCAPA (Root Cause Analysis & Preventive Action) meeting for the program, owned action items coming out of it, reported progress to executive team on them.

• Engineering Deliveries:

• Delivered platform & supporting process to publish over ~1.5 million content update in a month through stringent time restrictions. Reduced processing time by 30% by eliminating manual steps in legacy applications. (Python, PostgresSQL, AWS)

• Implemented AWS based scalable platform for data sourcing via scraping technology producing over 10 million records every month with less than 10% of estimated cost and 25% of estimated time – resulting into ~$ 2.2 million annual recurring revenue. (Python,AWS lambda)

• Centralized scattered legacy products with similar business values by bringing them into single product portfolio. Defined roadmap to migrate them into cloud solutions, enhance scalability & support exponential customer growth in future.

• People / Team Management:

• Led and managed a team of highly skilled senior professionals across multiple locations (India & US) & varying size.

• Responsible for hiring right talent, designing career progression & mentoring. Owned goal setting and performance reviews of the team – ensured alignment of engineering goals with business goals. Created next layer of leadership & subject matter experts.

• Conduct 1:1 & team meetings. Actively monitor for conflict and manage them as and when they occur. Keep team excited about their contribution by showing them big picture & transparency. Consistently look for opportunities to uplift individual as well as team’s collective skill set.

• Responsible hiring, mentoring & optimizing interns as Center level initiative.

As a Sr. Engineering Manager, primarily responsible for ensuring ground level operation & deliveries are aligning to organization

objective and road map. Responsibilities included day to day organization/management of tasks, sprints, releases, deployments etc.

Also responsible for hiring, coaching, mentoring technical staff of varying experience -from interns to software architect.

Major achievements:

• Led AWS migration efforts from data center to server-less model using AWS micro services. Implement simple policies for AWS

cost measurement & control. This directly translated over 40% cost saving & additional benefits in security & scalability areas.

• Led development teams to deliver high impact strategic business applications – mainly on back end / data projects and scalable SaaS

platform. Technology included C# .Net, ASP.net, MSSQL, IIS, SOAP & REST web services.

• Implemented automated test framework to run regression & functional tests via Jenkins.

• Deliver projects using latest UI and cloud technologies that help to solve Avalara’s content management problems. Own strategy to

deprecate legacy applications incrementally while fulfilling on-going commitments.

• Switched in multiple roles as and when needed – including Product Owner, Delivery lead, Program manager etc. Owned project

status tracking & reporting. Proactively identified risk areas for both – deliverable and team – and mitigated them successfully.

Joined Avalara as QA engineer, stepped up the ladder over 9 years, built multiple teams, delivered projects that built the foundation of

Avalara’s end-to-end offerings. During this tenure, shifted in many roles including Business Analyst, Product Owner, Scrum Master,

QA lead, DevOps / Build / Release engineer etc. Got chance to be part of the small group who laid the foundational process, tools &

methodologies that served as organization’s Quality Foundation over long term.

Major achievements:

• Built teams from 2 to 23 members in offshore office. Started as a QA engineer and progressed in different roles.

• Delivered high quality projects consistently for 9 years. Technology stack included Microsoft ERP's, .Net, XAMP, MS BI, Python.

• Implemented & owned CD / CI platform for multiple project with SRE / DevOps team. Defined phases, approach & milestones for

enterprise level CD/CI project.

• Defined, implemented and maintained process across multiple projects resulting in consistency.

• Led team of 23 people, cultivated leaders, did goal stetting & performance reviews, career progression planning etc.