Surya Prakash
Dubai, United Arab Emirates15+ Years of Experience
Banking infrastructure, mobile apps, call centres, and the ad campaigns that fill them. Personally, not through a layer of managers. Currently technology lead across three property and mortgage businesses.
Where I was personally responsible, by year. Each band comes from a role in the track record below.
On Security, the paler band is continuous responsibility and the solid section marks the years under a formal PCI DSS regime.
Infrastructure: 2011 to now. Product and Web: 2012 to 2017, 2023 to now. Data: 2014 to 2017. Security: 2011 to now, under a formal compliance regime 2017 to 2023. Mobile: 2023 to now. Commerce: 2012 to 2014. Voice: 2012 to 2014. Teams and Vendors: 2018 to now. Growth: 2011 to 2012, 2023 to now.
Forty-plus microservices on AWS carrying banking software, running under PCI DSS. Linux estates across Ubuntu, RedHat and CentOS. Monitoring and alerting on Zabbix, Graylog and the ELK stack. Four and a half years of it, on systems where a failure moves money.
A fifty-server Cloudera estate running HBase, HDFS, Hive and Impala behind campaign analytics, and the MySQL clusters underneath it.
Internal systems where partners, staff and clients each need something different from the same pipeline, and it still has to be one system.
iOS and Android from one React Native codebase, because the mobile surface was forms, lists and status, not anything that needed platform-native rendering.
Magento e-commerce at Juvalia & You: product catalogues, pricing rules, inventory, invoicing and shipment, integrated with SugarCRM, Unicom and Microsoft Navision. Payment gateway integration before that.
Built the servers and deployed a full call centre on FreePBX and Asterisk at Juvalia & You, then wrote the call detail reporting panel on top of it. Very few people who run a technology function have also run the phone system.
Cross-functional teams of DevOps and security engineers. Ten-plus vendor relationships, and the budget and contract conversations that come with them.
Google Ads and Meta lead generation, email marketing, and the landing pages the campaigns point at. Run in-house, not handed to an agency. Buying the traffic and building the page it lands on is an unusual pairing, and most technology leaders have never had to move a cost-per-acquisition number.
What the systems were for, and where each one came from.
Every operation has a queue, and the queue has one slow step. Most automation projects go after whatever is technically cleanest instead. That produces working software and no change in the business.
The question is never whether you can build it. It is whether a customer would notice if you did. If not, buy it, integrate it properly, and spend the team on the thing they would notice.
The interesting question about a technology choice is rarely what it can do today. It is what it costs to change your mind in eighteen months.
An architecture you cannot explain to the person holding the pager is one you have not finished designing. Systems get built to be operated, or they get operated badly.
PCI DSS is not a compliance exercise. It is a set of rules about how systems are allowed to be built, applied from the first decision. Retrofitting costs several times what designing against it costs, and the retrofit is always worse.
The architecture that was right two years ago is the constraint today, and the engineer who was right two years ago has stopped reading. So I assume the current design is wrong somewhere and keep the cost of finding out low. Learning did not end with the degree.
Vice President Technology
Property & Mortgage Group, Dubai, UAE
Technology lead across three businesses in the group.
The Lending Tree
Flagship product work: proposal automation, the partner, staff and client portal, and CRM rollout. Google Ads lead generation alongside it, including the landing pages the campaigns run to.
MVP Real Estate & Next Reality
Meta lead generation, Zoho CRM development and website management.
Head of IT & Security
DSSC Tech Ltd., Dubai, UAE
DSSC Tech is a fintech: it builds whole banking platforms for its clients. I ran the AWS infrastructure and security underneath them, forty-plus C# microservices under PCI DSS. An outage there is not a page that fails to load, it is somebody’s money.
Lead DevOps Engineer
Econet Wireless Limited, Dubai, UAE
AWS infrastructure and PCI DSS compliance.
Sr. Data Engineer / DevOps
Ogilvy & Mather (neo@Ogilvy), Gurugram, India
Ogilvy & Mather is one of the world’s best-known advertising networks, part of WPP. I ran a fifty-server AWS estate and the Cloudera big-data platform behind its campaign analytics, at global agency scale, working with the agency’s New York office. Contributed to its ad verification system.
Web Manager
Juvalia & You (Smile Group), Gurugram, India
Magento e-commerce, product catalogues and pricing, Linux infrastructure, and a full FreePBX call centre built on servers I set up.
Sr. System Admin / DevOps
Teck Freaks, Lucknow, India
Web and CRM systems, payment gateway integration, VoIP.
System Admin / DevOps
Elite Business Media, Lucknow, India
Web infrastructure, CRM operations and support.
DIAT Certified Information Assurance
Defence Institute of Advanced Technology, Pune, in association with DRDO, Ministry of Defence, India.
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Amazon Web Services.
Making Sense of Data
Google.
Reported a security vulnerability in the Uttar Pradesh Police recruitment system
Disclosed it to the department rather than acting on it. Recognised by the police department, and covered in print and broadcast media.
Bachelor in Computer Application
Institute of Advanced Studies in Education University, Rajasthan. First Division. I chose Artificial Intelligence as my final-semester paper, in 2009.
National Cadet Corps ‘A’ Certificate