Fractional CPTO / CTO
Shailendra Kumar
Engineer → Architect → Product Executive · Architecture, Data Platforms & AI
London, UK · Fractional / Interim / Advisory · 2–3 days per week · 22+ years · skumar@level9pm.com · LinkedIn
Summary
Software engineer turned tech lead, engineering manager and head of development, then product executive at Meta (WhatsApp), J.P. Morgan, PayPal and UBS. 22+ years delivering data platforms, APIs, ML/AI features and privacy/compliance systems in regulated financial services and at consumer scale. I work fractionally with founders and boards to set technology strategy, make architecture and build-vs-buy calls, restructure in-house and outsourced engineering, and run product and engineering on one roadmap. Hands-on at architecture, data-model and AI-prototype level; I lead engineers rather than write production code.
Fractional CPTO focus
- Technology strategy & modernisation: Architecture roadmaps tied to revenue goals; build-vs-buy and vendor selection; legacy re-architecture, consolidation and SaaS/API productisation.
- Data engineering: Data pipelines, ETL, warehousing, big-data, lakehouse and real-time platforms, data modelling, MDM and analytics.
- AI & ML delivery: Recommendation, search, detection models and agentic workflows from prototype to production, with human-in-the-loop controls.
- Governance, security & compliance: Privacy-by-design, SSO/RBAC/audit trails, KYC and regulatory reporting, and data governance frameworks.
- Engineering organisation design: Squads, onshore/offshore and outsourced delivery models, Agile cadence, hiring and coaching.
Current engagements
Founder — Level9AI
AI consulting & agentic automation
- Agentic automation, lead-to-revenue systems and prototype-to-production AI delivery for UK/EU SMEs.
Fractional CPO — InvoTools
Post-purchase agentic commerce
- Product strategy, roadmap and commercialisation for a post-purchase agentic commerce product (APPP).
Leadership highlights
WhatsApp (Meta) — Product Lead
Integrity & Business Messaging
- Led four squads on integrity against scraping, scripted attacks and scams; launched Lists, Labels and Orders for 200M+ businesses, lifting engagement 4×.
- Led Click-to-WhatsApp Ads signals and monetisation; a privacy-first framework across seven teams contributed to 6× growth to $3.5B+ annual revenue.
- Automated ground-truth signals to replace an approximately 11K-labels/day manual process, saving $3.3M annual OPEX; integrity work raised attacker cost approximately 100×.
Meta — Senior Product Manager
Video across Facebook, Messenger & Instagram
- Led video strategy reaching 12M weekly active users and 25% weekly retention; launched Facebook Classes, then closed it based on retention data.
J.P. Morgan — Executive Director of Product
DataQuery
- Led 50+ engineers and four PMs across API, AI-driven search and recommendations, and data; turned a free tool serving 1,600 institutional clients into an $8M+ ARR SaaS business in about 18 months.
- Won 12 enterprise clients; shipped enterprise APIs with metering, SSO, role-based access and audit logs.
UBS — Director of Product Development
Research Technology; earlier technical lead, Client Data
- Built the Evidence Lab data platform and defined big-data architecture and build-vs-buy direction; scaled the organisation from 12 to 60+ globally, including seven PMs, supporting an IB Equity Research ranking rise from #7 to #1.
- Earlier at UBS (2011–2014), built cross-asset client revenue data infrastructure and modernised legacy systems.
VP Product Management — UK fintech startup
Founding product executive
- Launched a SaaS MVP in five months, reaching 50K users; supported the Series A raise and scaled the product team from 0 to 40+, hiring and coaching six PMs in six months.
PayPal — Lead Product Manager
SMB merchants, APAC
- Led four PM squads on merchant signup, KYC onboarding and activation: retention rose from 50% to 65% with 20% year-on-year regional growth. Launched the Business Debit Mastercard in the UK and EU; active spend rose 15%.
Engineering & architecture foundation · 2001–2014
- Sapient — Development Manager: Led a 25-person onshore/offshore investment-bank re-architecture programme; saved £6M by consolidating five legacy commodity-trading systems; set BI/MDM strategy for a trading warehouse.
- TRAX — Development Manager: Led a 20-person team re-engineering trade-matching and regulatory-reporting platforms using Java, Spring, Camel and Oracle.
- Ketera — Engineering Manager: Re-architected the MVC middle tier and data layer for 60% better performance; delivered ETL, ML data profiling and a predictive analytics product supporting $2M deals.
- PeerMe — Co-founder & MD: Built a 50+ person team; launched a P2P voice/video product to 200K+ users and raised $5M+.
- GE & Manhattan Associates: Senior Software Engineer in B2B e-commerce and Team Lead in supply-chain management.
Core strengths
Technical toolkit
- Architecture: Enterprise and data architecture, Lambda and event-driven systems, CEP, SOA, MVC / n-tier, API design and legacy modernisation.
- Data & cloud: Spark, Scala, Hadoop/HDFS, Hive, HBase, Cloudera, Greenplum, Databricks, AWS, Azure, GCP, Oracle, SQL/PL-SQL, ETL, data warehousing, MDM and Tableau.
- AI / ML: Recommendation and search, detection and classification models, LLM agents, RAG, n8n, Claude and human-in-the-loop evaluation.
- Engineering & delivery: Java/J2EE, Spring, JMS/Tibco EMS, Apache Camel, Jenkins, Git, Linux, Agile/Scrum and Jira.
- Governance & risk: Privacy-by-design, SSO/RBAC/audit logging, KYC/CIP, regulatory reporting and data governance.
Education
MBA, Distinction — London Business School · M.Tech, Computer Science — IIIT Bangalore · B.E. (Gold Medal) — Anna University · Six Sigma GB