Thazim Banu Shaffee

About

Engineering leader/player-coach on a risk core transaction platform (payments/branded checkout) who led major migrations from a monolithic stack to microservices, including API contract redesign and performance improvements (reported ~500ms latency reduction). Experienced running high-stakes production incidents (upgrade-related outage/degradation) end-to-end with RCA and rollout-process changes, and has accelerated delivery via documentation/tooling (audit sign-off cycle reduced from ~3 sprints to ~1).

Experience

Education

Key Strengths

• Led monolith-to-microservices migrations for global payments/branded checkout on a risk transaction platform
• Performance improvement delivery (reported ~500ms latency reduction) with conversion-rate impact focus
• Strong technical leadership: owns design decisions, API contract changes, and rigorous review/testing gates (UT/EFT)
• Effective cross-functional alignment during reorg/scope conflicts using data-driven, business-impact framing
• Incident leadership under SLA pressure: handled degradation during upgrade (CPU spikes), rollback, RCA, and prevention via slow rollouts
• Improved delivery speed via lightweight process/tooling (audit sign-off reduced from ~3 sprints to ~1 sprint through mapping/tooling)
• People leadership with structured 1:1s, actionable coaching, and recognition mechanisms (bravo board)

Reference Highlights

• Led a critical risk platform supporting PayPal-branded payments and >$1T annual volume
• Delivered major latency improvement (p95 1400ms to 900ms)
• Removed hundreds of redundant service calls and DB queries per payment attempt
• Drove measurable business impact (checkout conversion increase, operational cost savings)
• Enabled major partners (Shopify, BigCommerce) with secure, cutting-edge fraud controls
• Highly recognized by risk and payment platform leadership
• Hands-on manager with strong code/design review involvement
• Thoughtful, intentional technical judgment in design decisions
• Strong player-coach; develops top talent and delegates ownership effectively
• Quickly unblocks teams and resolves conflicts
• Invests in long-term, durable process/solution improvements
• Strong end-to-end execution from ambiguous requirements to shipped outcomes
• Clear documentation of tradeoffs and decision process
• Excellent incident ownership; first responder and drives mitigation to completion
• Strong follow-through with postmortems and preventive actions
• Customer champion mindset
• Effective people manager; provides career feedback and coaching
• Proactively manages team morale and psychological health; addresses burnout
• Enabled significant growth of a senior engineer into a domain lead
• Strong cross-functional partnership and structured prioritization with Product/stakeholders
• Maintains regular stakeholder cadence and communicates prioritization outcomes clearly