Sridhar S

Global Service Reliability and Site Operations Leader with 20+ years of experience transforming mission-critical FinTech platforms through SRE operations, incident command, AIOps, observability and ITIL governance while delivering 99.999% availability and operational excellence across distributed teams.

Manager 2, Site Operations at PayPal (2025-04 – Present)

• Directed a 24x7 command center model supporting mission-critical payment services and led 12+ professionals responsible for global incident management and service restoration.
• Strengthened service resilience and sustained 99.999% availability by integrating observability practices, KPI governance and proactive reliability controls.
• Spearheaded AI-driven support transformation initiatives that automated recurring engineering workflows and lowered L1 support costs by 40% without additional headcount.
• Accelerated developer engagement cycles by reducing average response times from several hours to less than two minutes.
• Designed and institutionalized change-quality mechanisms that reduced change-induced P0/P1 incidents by 50% and improved execution accountability across domains.
• Consolidated merchant incident workflows and introduced dedicated escalation mechanisms that improved MTTR by 25% for SMB customer-impacting events.
• Automated executive communication workflows and impact calculations, shrinking leadership notification cycles from approximately 30 minutes to under five minutes during crisis events.
• Launched innovation programs that generated more than 50 employee ideas and enabled 20+ process and automation improvements that reduced operational toil.
• Reinforced postmortem governance practices, achieving 90% executive-approved corrective action closure and preventing repeat critical failures.
• Built real-time KPI dashboards delivering operational visibility across 20+ APAC teams and reducing reporting overhead for leaders.

Manager, Site Operations at PayPal (2022-08 – 2025-03)

• Directed a 24x7 command center model supporting mission-critical payment services and led 12+ professionals responsible for global incident management and service restoration.
• Strengthened service resilience and sustained 99.999% availability by integrating observability practices, KPI governance and proactive reliability controls.
• Spearheaded AI-driven support transformation initiatives that automated recurring engineering workflows and lowered L1 support costs by 40% without additional headcount.
• Accelerated developer engagement cycles by reducing average response times from several hours to less than two minutes.
• Designed and institutionalized change-quality mechanisms that reduced change-induced P0/P1 incidents by 50% and improved execution accountability across domains.
• Consolidated merchant incident workflows and introduced dedicated escalation mechanisms that improved MTTR by 25% for SMB customer-impacting events.
• Automated executive communication workflows and impact calculations, shrinking leadership notification cycles from approximately 30 minutes to under five minutes during crisis events.
• Launched innovation programs that generated more than 50 employee ideas and enabled 20+ process and automation improvements that reduced operational toil.
• Reinforced postmortem governance practices, achieving 90% executive-approved corrective action closure and preventing repeat critical failures.
• Built real-time KPI dashboards delivering operational visibility across 20+ APAC teams and reducing reporting overhead for leaders.

Critical Incident Manager Lead at PayPal (2020-01 – 2022-07)

• Served as the highest operational escalation point for P0 and P1 incidents impacting millions of customers and merchants globally.
• Orchestrated incident command activities across more than ten engineering and infrastructure organizations to accelerate restoration and minimize business disruption.
• Reduced average MTTR by 30% through structured communication models, recovery coordination and stakeholder engagement.
• Established runbook-driven execution frameworks that improved operational readiness and response consistency.
• Implemented preventive mechanisms and knowledge practices that eliminated repeat P0 incidents.
• Enhanced crisis communication models and strengthened transparency across technical and business stakeholders.
• Contributed to sustaining five-nines availability across global payment platforms.

Problem Management Analyst at PayPal (2016-12 – 2020-01)

• Moved problem management from reactive ticket administration to a proactive reliability discipline to aid engineering accountability.
• Reduced recurring incidents by 50% across 25+ engineering teams through structured 5-Why analysis & corrective action governance.
• Achieved 90% corrective action closure and improved visibility into systemic risks through KPI-based reporting frameworks.
• Conceived and drove deployment of an automated postmortem portal that replaced manual ServiceNow activities and achieved full engineering adoption within three months.
• Established a centralized knowledge repository and reusable playbooks that reduced root-cause analysis cycles by 25%.
• Enabled data-driven decision making by surfacing reliability trends & chronic failure patterns before they escalated into major outages.
• Delivered near-zero recurrence of high-severity incidents by embedding prevention into engineering processes.

Problem Manager at Ness Technologies (Deputed to PayPal) (2013-09 – 2016-11)

Change Management Analyst at Ness Technologies (Deputed to PayPal) (2011-09 – 2013-08)

Senior QA Analyst at Ness Technologies (Deputed to PayPal) (2007-11 – 2011-08)

QA Analyst at SCM Microsystems (2005-11 – 2007-11)

Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science Engineering – Prince Shri Padmavathi Engineering College, Chennai (2005)