Engineering Leadership · Toronto, ON

Ritvika Palan

Engineering Manager  ·  Director Tech Lead
Delivery & Technical Support

"I've spent 12 years figuring out how to get good software out the door without burning out the people building it."

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12+
Years leading cross-functional engineering teams
$60M
Program budgets managed end-to-end
4×
Client base growth driven at RBC (14K → 64K)
80%
Brand perception score achieved from 40% baseline
Toronto, Ontario, Canada
ritvikapalan@gmail.com
647-971-5911
linkedin.com/in/ritvika-p
01

About Me

I started out as a developer, and I think that shapes how I lead. I don't manage from a distance — I'm in the weeds with the team on architecture decisions, release blockers, and the stuff that falls through the cracks between squads.

Right now I'm at Manulife, where I'm standing up a Delivery & Technical Support team for the Group Benefits platform from scratch — hiring, tooling, process, the works. Before that I spent three years at RBC running large programs ($40M–$60M) and somehow keeping everything on track while the client base grew 4×.

I've worked across banking, insurance, healthcare, and a few others. The domains change but the problems are usually similar: unclear ownership, shaky CI/CD, teams that aren't talking to each other. I've gotten decent at fixing those.

Working toward my PMP. ITIL certified. I use AI tools (Copilot, Claude) daily and try to actually integrate them into how the team works, not just demo them in a meeting.

02

Domain Experience

Banking & Finance
Insurance & Health
Healthcare
Media & Entertainment
Consumer & Retail
Consulting & PMO
02

Experience

Engineering Manager Manulife Jan 2024 – Present
  • Leading a multi-squad team across the GB Experience platform — my main job is removing blockers and making sure people know what they're supposed to be building and why
  • Building the DTS function from the ground up: defined the team charter, hired the first few members, and set up the support model alongside existing delivery squads
  • Pushed the team toward proper CI/CD hygiene with GitHub Actions and Jenkins — we had manual deployments happening well into 2024 and that's slowly changing
  • Own production incident response for our assets; I'm usually the one bridging the gap between what the on-call engineer knows and what the business stakeholders need to hear at 2am
  • Using AI tooling (Copilot, Claude) for code review prep, post-incident writeups, and sprint docs — genuinely useful, not just a talking point
  • Working across GCP, AWS, and Azure depending on the workload — not an infrastructure specialist but comfortable enough to have real conversations with the platform team
SAFeCI/CDGCP · AWS · AzureAI ToolsITILDTS
Director Tech Lead Royal Bank of Canada (RBC) Mar 2021 – Jan 2024
  • Ran three major programs back to back — the big one took the client base from 14,000 to 64,000; budget was $40M–$60M and we landed on time, which I'm still proud of
  • Had a team of 13+ at peak; the coordination overhead alone was a full-time job, especially with onshore/offshore splits and shifting priorities from the business side
  • Led an omnichannel rollout that moved brand perception from 40% to 80% — not a metric I expected to own as a tech lead, but it became the north star for the whole initiative
  • Set up proper production monitoring with New Relic and Moogsoft after inheriting a codebase with basically no observability — we went from reactive firefighting to actually knowing about issues before clients did
  • Dealt with a lot of regulatory compliance work; not glamorous but it taught me how to build risk frameworks that the legal team actually trusted
$40M–$60M ProgramsOmnichannelSDLCNew RelicRegulatory
Spec II – IC Dev (Tech Lead) Bank of Montreal (BMO / BMO Harris US) Jan 2018 – Mar 2021
  • First real taste of owning delivery end-to-end — charters, schedules, status reporting, the lot. Learned quickly that the plan is never the plan
  • Inherited a codebase sitting at 10% unit test coverage and spent a chunk of my first year getting it to 80% — not exciting work but it cut production incidents noticeably
  • Pushed for a proper CI/CD setup when most of the team was still doing manual builds; got regression cycle time down by about 40%
CI/CDTest AutomationAgile ScrumTech Debt
Consultant / Project Manager Capgemini Jun 2015 – Sep 2017
  • Walt Disney: Worked on responsive web redesigns — my first exposure to a client where brand standards were taken very seriously. Good training in sweating the details
  • QMS Application: Managed a 15-person team split across time zones to deliver a Quality Management System with BI reporting. A lot of early mornings and late calls, but we shipped it
  • Capgram PMO App: Ran the full project myself — requirements, delivery, stakeholder comms. Probably the role that convinced me I actually liked this side of the work
Walt DisneyPMOBI ToolsOnshore/Offshore
Web Developer Analyst Accenture Jan 2014 – May 2015
  • Merck: Built UIs for internal healthcare tools — learned fast that pharma has layers of compliance and data sensitivity rules that you can't cut corners on. Good grounding early in my career
  • P&G: Migrated an existing UI to Bootstrap to make it fully responsive. Mostly frontend work — LESS, CSS components, the basics — but it's where I got comfortable moving fast in a large codebase
Healthcare DomainMerckP&GBootstrap
03

Skills & Tools

Leadership & Delivery
  • Agile / Scrum / SAFe
  • SDLC (full lifecycle)
  • CI/CD Pipeline Delivery
  • Technical Roadmapping
  • Budget & Resource Management
  • Stakeholder Communication
  • Risk & Compliance Management
  • ITIL / Quality Management
Cloud & Infrastructure
  • GCP · AWS · Azure
  • GitHub Actions · Jenkins (CI/CD)
  • New Relic · Moogsoft (Observability)
  • Git / SVN
  • NodeJS
  • MySQL
  • DevOps Practices
AI Tools
  • GitHub Copilot
  • Microsoft Copilot (M365)
  • ChatGPT (OpenAI)
  • Claude (Anthropic)
  • Cursor
Frontend & Frameworks
  • Angular 14 · NgRx
  • HTML5 · CSS3 · JavaScript
  • Ionic / Cordova
  • Bootstrap · LESS
  • SDL Tridion · Joomla
PM & Collaboration Tools
  • JIRA · Confluence
  • Salesforce
  • Figma · InVision · Mural
  • LucidChart
Domain Knowledge
  • Banking & Finance
  • Insurance / Group Benefits
  • Healthcare (Pharma)
  • Media & Entertainment
  • Consumer & Retail
  • Consulting & PMO
04

Impact & Recognition

64K
Clients reached from 14K — 4× growth at RBC
$60M
Program budget managed with rigorous governance
80%
Brand perception score achieved from 40% baseline
80%
Unit test coverage raised from 10% at BMO
RBC · 2022
Q4 Award
For pushing AI tooling into the team's workflow before it was a company initiative
BMO · 2020
Recognition Award
Ran test automation knowledge transfer sessions across the team — apparently people found them useful
Capgemini · 2016
Spot Award
Delivered the Capgram PMO app on a tight timeline with a small team
Accenture · 2014
Appreciation Award
Early in my career — picked up work outside my lane to help the team hit a deadline
05

Certifications

ITIL
ITIL Foundation Certificate
IT Service Management
FIN
Foundation Program in Finance
Oracle Financial Software Services Ltd.
PMP
PMP Certification
In Progress — Project Management Professional
05

Education

Bachelor of Engineering (B.E.)
Computer Engineering
2008 – 2011
Where I learned to code and discovered I was more interested in how teams build software than in the code itself. Took a while to admit that, but here we are.
Languages
English (Proficient)  ·  Hindi (Proficient)