Karan Vohra — Director of Engineering

Senior engineering leader with a proven track record of building, scaling, and transforming high-impact platforms and organizations across AWS, Oracle Cloud (OCI), and Microsoft Azure. I’ve led global teams of 70+ engineers, managers, and analysts to deliver critical infrastructure and data systems powering finance, developer tooling, and secure access in high-growth, high-compliance environments. I specialize in taking 0→1 bets and turning them into durable, high-scale systems—launching services like OCI’s Bastion platform, Stripe’s distributed cache (serving 20M+ RPS, storing over 1PB of data, powering ML/AI infra, and saving $10M+ by migrating off managed cloud services), and multiple automation and efficiency initiatives that delivered $7M+ in annual savings. At Stripe, I lead engineering for financial systems and developer infrastructure—driving the scaling of Stripe’s financial data platforms, improving data precision, and reducing KTLO through org-wide technical investments. Beyond systems, I’ve also scaled engineering organizations and led culture turnarounds. I’ve shaped hiring strategies, improved onboarding, and created team rituals that elevate collaboration, accountability, and growth. I’m passionate about building high-performing teams with strong foundations—environments where engineers are clear on the “why,” empowered to deliver, and supported in their development. I lead with a strong customer mindset, collaborating with 50+ internal teams across Stripe, including the Office of the CFO, GTM, and Ops stakeholders, to build scalable, audit-ready systems that solve real business pain points. Prior to Stripe, I was at block storage engineering at OCI—boosting performance to 35K RPS and charting a path to 100K+ and launched OCI Bastions—and previously delivered large-scale, cloud-native services for Bing Ads at Microsoft. I bring deep infrastructure expertise, broad cloud experience, and a people-first leadership style focused on clarity, care, and consistent execution.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Fintech and Infrastructure expert with a strong focus on cloud security and engineering leadership.

Location: Seattle, Washington, United States

Experience: 17 yrs 7 mos

Skills

Financial Systems
Infrastructure
Cloud Security
Software Engineering

Career Highlights

Led global teams of 70+ engineers at Stripe.
Achieved $10M+ savings by optimizing cloud services.
Built high-scale systems in high-compliance environments.

Work Experience

Oracle

Sr. Director of Engineering (8 mos)

Stripe

Engineering Manager of Managers in Core Tech (Infra, Finance Systems) (2 yrs 5 mos)

Engineering Manager of Managers @ K/V and Edge infrastructure (3 yrs 7 mos)

Engineering Leader for Distributed Cache Service at Stripe (4 yrs 8 mos)

Oracle

Senior Manager, Cloud Security Products (1 yr 5 mos)

Principal Software Engineer, Cloud Security Products (4 mos)

Senior Software Engineer, Block Storage Infrastructure (2 yrs)

Microsoft

Senior Software Engineer, Bing Ads and Cortana (2 yrs 4 mos)

SDE 2 @ Microsoft Corporation, Bing Ads (2 yrs 5 mos)

Software Engineer Lead (1 yr 1 mo)

Software Developer (3 yrs 4 mos)

Education

Bachelor of Engineering - BE at Thapar Institute of Engineering & Technology

Karan Vohra

Director of Engineering

Seattle, Washington, United States17 yrs 7 mos experience

Highly Stable

Key Highlights

Led global teams of 70+ engineers at Stripe.
Achieved $10M+ savings by optimizing cloud services.
Built high-scale systems in high-compliance environments.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Fintech and Infrastructure expert with a strong focus on cloud security and engineering leadership.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Financial SystemsInfrastructureCloud SecuritySoftware Engineering

Other Skills

Data QualityAutomationEfficiencyKey Value StoresEdge InfrastructureDDoSCDN ServicesDistributed CachingData StorageOperational ExcellenceSSH AccessBastion ServicesSecure Access ServicesBlock Volume ServicePerformance Improvement

About

Experience

17 yrs 7 mos

Total Experience

6 yrs 5 mos

Average Tenure

4 yrs 8 mos

Current Experience

Oracle

Sr. Director of Engineering

Sep 2025 – Present · 8 mos

Stripe

3 roles

Engineering Manager of Managers in Core Tech (Infra, Finance Systems)

Dec 2023 – Present · 2 yrs 5 mos · Seattle, Washington, United States · Hybrid

Senior engineering leader driving financial systems and infrastructure at Stripe, leading a global organization of 70+ engineers, engineering managers, and data analysts across the US and India. Partnering closely with the Office of the CFO to build and operate Stripe’s financial infrastructure supporting Accounting, Finance & Strategy, Tax, GTM, Treasury, and Finance Operations. Lead the development of Stripe’s financial data warehouse and drive data quality and precision initiatives for core metrics like ONR and downstream business insights. Spearhead automation and efficiency efforts across global finance and product teams, delivering $3M+ in annual process savings and $4M+ in infrastructure savings. Champion operational excellence, reducing KTLO by over 50% through strategic automation and org-wide engineering investments. Deeply focused on meeting customers where they are—collaborating with Finance stakeholders to understand pain points, then designing scalable, reliable, and audit-ready systems that enable faster, more accurate insights. Combine infrastructure experience with the financial domain to bridge engineering and finance, delivering durable outcomes at scale.

Financial SystemsInfrastructureData QualityAutomationEfficiency

Engineering Manager of Managers @ K/V and Edge infrastructure

Oct 2022 – Present · 3 yrs 7 mos · Seattle, Washington, United States · Hybrid

Scaled team to manage persistent and ephemeral Key Value stores using OSS (Memcached, Sparkey) leading 20+ people in India and US, with 2 engineering managers reporting to me. (25M+ RPS, 99.999% uptime, <10ms p99)
Scaled team to 30+ people in India and US, with 3 engineering managers reporting to me, to manage K/V store and Edge Infrastructure (Edge clusters, DDOS, and CDN services like Fastly and CloudFront)

Key Value StoresEdge InfrastructureDDoSCDN ServicesInfrastructure

Engineering Leader for Distributed Cache Service at Stripe

Sep 2021 – Present · 4 yrs 8 mos · Seattle, Washington, United States · Hybrid

Led a team of 20+ engineers and managers to build and scale Stripe's distributed caching platform, handling 20M+ RPS, storing 1PB+ of data with 99.999% availability.
Partnered with 50+ internal product and platform teams to drive adoption and integration in 125+ services across AI/ML, Payments, and Developer platform systems.
Achieved $10M+ in annual savings by replacing managed cloud services, making build vs. buy decisions aligned with cost, compliance, and security goals.
Prioritized operational excellence initiatives to ensure KTLO (keep the lights on) work did not pause the sustained high velocity of execution
Technologies used: Memcached OSS, AWS compute (EC2, Graviton), Kafka

Distributed CachingData StorageOperational ExcellenceInfrastructure

Oracle

3 roles

Senior Manager, Cloud Security Products

Promoted

Apr 2020 – Sep 2021 · 1 yr 5 mos

Managing the bastion portfolio of OCI which includes the external customer facing OCI bastion service which provides secure and ephemeral SSH access to the target resources within OCI and 3 internal bastion services which allow internal OCI operators to securely access their hosts in overlay, substrate and ONSR regions.

Cloud SecuritySSH AccessBastion Services

Principal Software Engineer, Cloud Security Products

Dec 2019 – Apr 2020 · 4 mos

Building v1 secure access services from scratch, for external customers!!

Secure Access ServicesCloud Security

Senior Software Engineer, Block Storage Infrastructure

Dec 2017 – Dec 2019 · 2 yrs

Building highly scalable block volume service in Oracle Cloud Infrastructure. Worked on improving the end to end block volume performance and providing elastic block volume performance solution to customers, improving the usability of the service by providing consistent device volume naming feature on Linux Distributions, introducing dynamic piloting in the virtualization and data plane layers for higher quality of service and working on different virtualization implementations to abstract the complexity in the data plane layer.

Block Volume ServicePerformance ImprovementInfrastructure

Microsoft

4 roles

Senior Software Engineer, Bing Ads and Cortana

Promoted

Aug 2015 – Dec 2017 · 2 yrs 4 mos · Bellevue, Washington

Technical lead @ Bing Ads organization, Architerturing and implementing next generation software solutions for online search advertisers on Bing platform, Mentoring young talent and cultivating agile and productive team culture.

Software SolutionsAgile MethodologiesSoftware Engineering

SDE 2 @ Microsoft Corporation, Bing Ads

Promoted

Mar 2013 – Aug 2015 · 2 yrs 5 mos · Bellevue, Washington

Working as a Software Development Engineer 2 in Microsoft Online Advertisement products team (Bing Ads).
Delivered Product Listing Ads and Anti-Fraud Service.
Delivered Ad Rotation and Target Exclusions.
Developed solutions to scale and improve the overall performance of Bing Ads platform.
Migrated the Bing Ads Line of business applications over to Azure platform while taking care of logging, monitoring, automated deployments, security and automated builds.

Ad ServicesPerformance ImprovementSoftware Engineering