Karina Andrea

Engineering Director with 12+ years leading cloud-native platform delivery across Enterprise SaaS and Fintech. Built and scaled engineering organisations from the ground up, leading teams of 30+ engineers while maintaining predictable delivery and non-negotiable quality standards. Introduced AI development tooling and LLM integration across engineering and product.

Experienced engaging senior stakeholders to shape technical strategy, steer commercial investment in technology, and translate ambiguous business challenges into clear, deliverable outcomes. Strong foundation in client-facing, service-based delivery through founding engineering leadership at a technology consultancy, bringing the discipline of outcome-driven, multi-client delivery to every engagement.

Engineering Director at Maanch Limited (2023-02 – Present)

Led end-to-end engineering delivery for a financial data platform supporting institutional investment workflows across stewardship, ESG analytics, and investor account management. Managed a team of 30 engineers, including Engineering Leads and Engineers, across the full delivery lifecycle, from requirements through to production support.

• Architected a data-intensive, cloud-native multi-tenant SaaS platform for institutional investors from first principles, navigating high ambiguity to define scalable, long-term foundations.
• Engaged directly with senior stakeholders to steer technical direction and inform commercial investment decisions, presenting architecture trade-offs, delivery implications, and strategic options at leadership level.
• Integrated LLM-based features into the platform, including Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG), enabling intelligent workflows and reducing manual effort across institutional finance processes.
• Introduced AI coding assistants and development tooling across the engineering team, improving developer productivity and establishing repeatable delivery cycles.
• Championed CI/CD, observability, and structured API design, improving deployment frequency, reducing lead time, and tracking reliability metrics aligned with DORA standards.
• Designed and evolved microservices-based architectures using REST APIs, event-driven patterns, asynchronous messaging, and containerised workloads on cloud-native infrastructure.
• Provided hands-on technical leadership with direct contribution to development, testing, and deployment, including rapid prototyping to validate architectural decisions.
• Defined and enforced non-functional requirements across performance, scalability, resiliency, and operational recoverability for all platform services.
• Built and led a high-performing engineering team through an empathetic, people-first leadership style, fostering a culture of psychological safety, continuous learning, and high developer satisfaction, resulting in strong team retention and consistent delivery performance.

Founding Engineering Director at Agaetis Technologies (2018-07 – 2023-01)

Founding engineering leadership role at a technology services company, building the engineering organisation and delivery capability from the ground up. Worked directly with enterprise clients on complex product build and platform delivery initiatives across cloud and data domains.

• Partnered with client stakeholders to define technical strategy, architecture, and delivery approach for enterprise-grade cloud and data platforms, translating business requirements into scalable technical solutions.
• Built and mentored a team of 30+ engineers across multiple disciplines, establishing engineering culture, best practices, and career progression frameworks from scratch.
• Designed and implemented multi-cloud architecture across AWS and GCP, achieving a 30% infrastructure cost reduction while maintaining delivery velocity and system resilience.
• Led end-to-end delivery of client engagements from concept through live operation, ensuring scalability, security, and long-term maintainability.
• Defined architecture principles and governance standards across infrastructure, integration, and information security, adopted across the organisation.
• Oversaw service transition and operational readiness for platforms supporting critical client business functions, ensuring zero-disruption handover to operations.

Senior Developer at Media.net (2016-04 – 2018-07)

• Delivered and supported high-traffic digital platforms for global media brands including Forbes.
• Improved platform performance and reliability through data-driven optimisation across distributed systems.
• Collaborated with product and commercial stakeholders to deliver business-aligned features at scale.

MIT XPRO in Designing and Building AI Products and Services – Massachusetts Institute of Technology (2023)

Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology – University of Mumbai (2013)