About

Prajeesh Thirunala is a highly accomplished leader with over 22 years of experience in end-to-end technology product development and 14+ years of hands-on technical leadership experience. Currently serving as the Vice President of Technology, Global Payment Network at American Express, he has proven experience in building and scaling organizations, executing large scale technology transformation programs, and grooming leaders who can establish and sustain high performance culture. Prajeesh is currently leading an organization of 200+ engineers that is rebuilding American Express Payment Network using open systems and distributed computing. He is passionate about dev-ops culture, developer productivity and CI/CD, operational challenges in distributed software deployments, security, horizontal scalability, resilience, and availability. With a deep understanding of the payments domain, specifically payment network services, and merchant and acquiring services, Prajeesh has expertise in distributed systems, cloud computing, microservices, service orchestration, NoSQL and caching, CI/CD, application integration, and more. His tech stack includes Ansible, CI/CD, Spark, Kubernetes, Docker, NoSQL, Hadoop, Jenkins, Microservices, DevOps, Integration, Web, Golang, and Java. Prior to his current role, Prajeesh served as Senior Director at Visa, where he built Visa's next-generation payment processing system based on Open Standards. He has also served as Director at Visa in the past. Prajeesh holds a Bachelor's Degree in Computer Science & Engineering from the National Institute of Technology Calicut and completed his Executive General Management Program from the Indian Institute of Management, Bangalore. He is a collaborative leader who believes in building strong relationships within technology and business across the enterprise spanning geographies. With over 24 years of relevant experience, Prajeesh is a highly skilled professional in his field.