Rajeev Kalra

Accomplished senior-level IT Manager with over 22 years of experience in the financial industry. Known for delivering innovative technology solutions and driving operational improvements. Proven ability to manage large-scale projects in banking, finance, and regulatory sectors on time and within budget. Skilled in budgeting, forecasting, reducing business costs, enhancing commercial effectiveness, and ensuring quality performance across all services. Expert in sponsor and stakeholder management, adept at engaging with senior stakeholders in both business and technology realms. Demonstrated team-based leadership style with strong interpersonal and communication skills.

• Juno Community Mentoring Leadership Program (2013)
• Various Leadership & Coaching Trainings
• PRINCE2 Registered Practitioner – APMG-International (2012)
• Agile SDLC in Action – NAB Academy (2012)
• ITIL (v2) Certified – NAB Academy (2012)
• Various trainings on Leadership, Management (Operations and Project Management), Presenting Persuasively, Agile Management etc.
• Professional .NET Training by Readify (5 days) - 2007
• Advanced SQL Server 2005 – SSIS, SSAS, OLAP, Advanced T-SQL (5 days) – 2006
• Sun Certified Java Programmer - 1.4 (SCJP) - 2003
• Microsoft Certified Solution Developer (MCSD) – 1999 (Visual C++ 6.0, SQL Server & Windows Architecture I/II)

• Improved service quality, reliability, operational process, and system capacity across my performance unit. Significantly improved the technology operational risk profile in collaboration with investment projects, DevOps team and service providers.
• Significantly uplifted the disaster recovery success rate (from 27% to 100%) for all the applications across my portfolio within a year.
• Reduced the ongoing storage operational cost by $1.3m/year. Worked with multiple technology & business units and analyzed the retention requirements for the core systems data. Collaborated with our key strategic infrastructure vendor partner in updating the backup polices to align with the requirements and thus reducing the ongoing operational storage cost.
• Successfully managed and delivered key strategic projects including development of realistic and agreed plans covering time, effort, budgeting, and resource planning and exceeding business expectations along with providing key business benefits for e.g. addressing the operational risk, capital relief etc.
• Successfully reduced operational cost by approx. 30% (compared to previous year) by implementing a “RAPID Response” program to deliver on permanent fixes for re-occurring issues.
• Successfully implemented development standards and best practices that significantly increased quality, productivity, and time-to-market for the delivery of changes to core assets supporting business functions.
• Repeated success in leading the development, delivery, maintenance, and support of software products & projects.
• Implemented Kanban agile processes using JIRA and enabled faster delivery of BAU work & Project changes.
• Automated operational support process with Jenkins, eliminating 80% of manual work
• Enabled business to roll off about $30m of capital by delivering a key strategic project ahead of time with a high quality solution and exceeding business expectations.
• Transitioned the operational environment from ‘Very Unstable (Red)’ to ‘Unstable (Amber)’ and then to ‘Stable (Green)’ within first 12 months of taking over operational environment.
• Provided significant lead time for regulatory risk reporting by leading a process improvement activity to reduce the EOD processing time by approx. 3hrs across 3 regions.
• Implemented ITIL based Service Management processes related to Incident (Event), Request, Change and Problem Management to track and meet the established Service Level Agreement (SLAs)
• Instilled a culture of ‘Leave things better than what you find them’ in every team member of my team
• Collaborated with business customers to establish strategic and tactical product direction.

• APPLICATION SPECIALIST & DEV LEAD (Team & People Lead– 5 Direct Reports) / (March 2010 – December 2010)
• SENIOR TECHNICAL LEAD (Team & People Lead - 6 Direct Reports, 5 Indirect Reports) / (March 2009 – March 2010)
• DELIVERY TEAM LEAD (CRR) (Team & People Lead - 4 direct reports) / (August 2008 – March 2009)
• DELIVERY TEAM LEAD (DIVERSIFIED VAR) (Team Lead - 3 Indirect Reports) / (Feb 2008 – July2008)
• SOLUTION DESIGNER/SOLUTION ARCHITECT (September 2007 – Feb 2008)
• SENIOR ANALYST PROGRAMMER (May 2000 – September 2007)

• SENIOR SOFTWARE CONSULTANT – Mobile Development / Product Development / Qantas Airways - (AUSTRALIA) / (Sep 1999 – April 2000)
• PROGRAMMER / SENIOR PROGRAMMIER / PROJECT LEAD – Product Development / TECKINFO SOLUTIONS PVT. LTD. - (Delhi, India) / (JUNE 1997 – JULY 1999)
• ANALYST PROGRAMMER – Product Development / BUSY INFOTECH Product PVT. LTD. - (Delhi, India) / (January 1996 – April 1997)