Saju Vallikkat Thanayankezhil — Co-Founder
Executive leadership calls me the engineering and people manager. Engineers call me the Executive Leader. They’re both right. I’ve spent my career at the intersection of technology, data, engineering, and human decision-making - a place where engineering design and analytics become intuition, and complex systems turn into products customers love. I began my career in engineering, building trading gateways and distributed services, and ultimately led a global engineering team in delivering data science, AI, and engineering products for the world’s largest consumer platforms. Across PayPal, Amazon, and now Oracle, my throughline has been constant: take messy, high-volume data, uncover what actually matters, and build teams and systems that use those insights to drive growth, reliability, and customer delight. At Amazon, I built and led international engineering teams that shaped the seller experience for millions worldwide. I launched the ML-powered Growth Navigator, a recommendation engine that drove $1.8B in incremental GMS in a single year, and developed experimentation frameworks that brought clarity to how sellers engage, learn, and grow. In PayPal’s high-stakes financial ecosystem, I led the delivery of tokenization systems and settlement services that handled transactions at massive scale. At Oracle, I direct teams building next-generation observability, AI/ML anomaly detection, and cloud-scale data pipelines. We designed a medallion-architecture data lake that powers SaaS-wide intelligence; built ML systems that improve incident detection with 75% precision; and delivered pipelines that cut operational cost by a third. I’m still doing what I’ve always done: translating ambiguity into architecture, analytics into strategy, and engineering into business outcomes. No matter how the tools evolve - distributed systems, cloud, ML, now GenAI - the fundamentals never change: 1. Understand the customer and the business better than anyone else. 2. Build teams that solve hard problems with clarity and rigor. 3. Tell the story behind the data so executives can act with confidence. 4. Deliver systems that scale - technically, operationally, and organizationally. The craft is the constant: lead with vision, execute with discipline, and build products, platforms, and people that last. Now I’m looking for the next frontier - an opportunity where engineering, data, AI, and organizational leadership come together to build something enduring. If you're working at that intersection, I’d love to connect.
Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS and Fintech expert with a strong focus on engineering leadership and data-driven decision making.
Location: Seattle, Washington, United States
Experience: 25 yrs 2 mos
Skills
- Cloud Computing
- Engineering Leadership
- Product Strategy
- Technical Engineering
- Software Development
Career Highlights
- Led global engineering teams at Amazon and Oracle.
- Delivered $1.8B incremental GMS through innovative ML solutions.
- Expert in translating data insights into strategic business outcomes.
Work Experience
Kokos.ai
Seed Investor (7 mos)
Oracle
Software Development Director (3 yrs 4 mos)
Amazon
Software Development Manager (4 yrs 6 mos)
Software Development Manager (1 yr 5 mos)
PayPal
Software Engineering & PD Manager (3 yrs)
MTS-1 Software Engineer (4 yrs 3 mos)
Computer Sciences Corporation (CSC)
Associate Manager (2 yrs 11 mos)
i|Nautix Technologies India Pvt Ltd
Team Lead (6 yrs)
Education
Senior Management Program at Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta
BTech at University of Calicut
