Resume: Sankate Sharma

Email: sankate@sankate.com LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sankate/

Summary

Engineering leader with 20+ years building and operating scalable, high-reliability distributed systems — across payments/fintech and, most recently, ML- and LLM-powered ads products at Meta. Track record of five-nines operational excellence, scaling orgs to 200+ engineers, and shipping ML and Gen AI products end to end — from hypothesis through gated experiment to global launch.

Core strengths: Distributed systems at scale · Operational excellence (on-call, incident response, SLA/SLO, reliability) · ML-powered product delivery · Gen AI product development (LLM applications, evaluation, guardrails) · Security, privacy & compliance · Building and growing high-performing engineering teams.

Experience

Engineering Leader at Meta Inc. (Jun 2022 – Present) — Austin, TX / Menlo Park, CA

Hands-on engineering leader managing 10+ member team building ML/AI-powered ad creation, targeting, and ranking systems serving 100’s of millions of daily impressions with five-nines availability.
Led 0→1 AI products, including an LLM-powered advertiser response system, while driving AI-native engineering practices that reduced experimentation cycle time by ~25%.
Own engineering strategy, roadmap, hiring, budgeting, and global product delivery, partnering closely with product, ML, data science, privacy, legal, and compliance.

Director of Engineering at WePay Inc., a JPMorgan Chase company (Feb 2015 – Jun 2022) — RedwoodCity, CA

Ran the entire Small Business (SMB) engineering org covering customer experiences, real-time reporting, pricing, billing, webhooks, emails, notifications, and reconciliation.
Scaled the engineering team from 20 to 200+ engineers.
Owned the security and compliance posture of the payments platform — authentication, identity, encryption, PCI-DSS compliance, privacy controls, and fraud prevention — meeting the trust and regulatory bar required for financial services at scale.
Achieved five nines of uptime through a Linkerd-based service mesh for robust microservice management, CI/CD pipelines enabling multiple releases per day, and gatekeeper frameworks for blue-green deployments.
Refactored the engineering stack to handle 10x transaction volume by migrating to the cloud and adopting a service-oriented Java microservices architecture.
Managed the seamless integration of WePay with Chase following the JPMorgan Chase acquisition in Q4 2017.
Reduced interchange cost by migrating USD processing from WorldPay to Chase with zero downtime.
Implemented automated data pipelines on Google Dataflow (Apache Beam) for daily reconciliation and near-real-time reporting.
Defined engineering SLAs/SLOs and prioritization guidelines to establish an efficient operating model between engineering and product.
Defined company-wide processes for design reviews, engineering promotions, and career growth.

Architect at Intuit Inc. (Feb 2010 – Jan 2015) — Mountain View, CA

Owned cloud strategy and roadmap for the SBG group (QuickBooks Online).
Provided technical leadership to geographically distributed teams across Mountain View, India, and Orem, UT.
Defined the architecture for the cloud-native offering of Intuit Websites (Homestead Inc.).

Staff Engineer at Motorola Inc. (2006 – 2010) — Sunnyvale, CA

Led development of the first MOTOBLUR set-top box integration, with Flickr and Pandora apps showcased at trade shows including CES.
Delivered external communications and team presentations and trained marketing teams on social media integration — work recognized with a Bravo award.
Worked across engineering roles in the mobile (Android) and embedded (set-top box) groups.

Software Engineer (1997 – 2006)

Held server-side and full-stack engineering roles at Nokia (network services and charging systems), Union Pacific Railroad / ProKarma (EDI-based freight tracking replacing mainframe systems), Patni Computer Systems (Honeywell, NYSE, Pitney Bowes; led an offshore team in New Delhi), Newgen Software (Sun Microsystems, Canon document management), and Network Programs (video-on-demand for Fujitsu).

Languages Tools, and Frameworks

Languages: Java, Python
Platforms & infrastructure: Spring, Kubernetes, Docker, Kafka, Cassandra, MySQL, Apache Beam, Service Mesh, CI/CD
AI/ML: ML lifecycle & MLOps · ranking and targeting systems · LLM application development · prompt & context engineering · retrieval/grounding · evaluation & guardrails
Domains: Distributed Systems, Microservices, Cloud Architecture, Large-scale Backend Systems, Security & Compliance

Education

MS, Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning — University of Texas at Austin, TX (expected Fall 2026) MS, Software Engineering — San Jose State University, CA, USA BTech, Computer Science — Rohilkhand University, UP, India

Patents

Pre-built user interface for payment system and method US11436601B2 · Issued Aug 17, 2022