Harish Raghavendra

Director · Data & AI Governance · Platform Strategy

Building trustworthy data and AI platforms that scale globally

20+ years designing high-impact platforms, guiding governance policy, and mentoring distributed teams that unlock responsible innovation across fintech, payments, and compliance.

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215B+ transactions safeguarded each year
80+ engineers led across global teams
20+ years steering AI & data strategy

Strategic Focus

Delivering compliant, scalable AI experiences with measurable business outcomes.

Executive Summary

Hands-on executive bridging policy, engineering, and product. I translate complex regulations into platform capabilities, craft trustworthy AI guardrails, and coach leaders to scale sustainably.

Key Metrics

Evidence of execution velocity across data, AI, and governance initiatives.

98% policy adherence across AI programs
95% reduction in governance review time via autonomous A2A pipeline
$3.5B run-rate revenue influenced by data products

Platform Wins

  • AI-Driven GRC Platform: 40+ agents · A2A 3-tier pipeline (16 skills → 6 commands → 3 workflows) · Claude MCP integration · blockchain audit registry · 95% faster reviews · multi-million revenue unlock
  • NextGen Merchant Data Platform spanning 136M+ merchant locations across Merchants, PayFacs, Acquirers
  • Self-supported Visa Core Hadoop 3.x distribution saving $85M+ over 5 years
  • Self-service agent-based API platform managing 12K+ servers via 1,500+ APIs

Technical Leadership & Expertise

Data & AI Platforms

  • Big Data Fabric (Hadoop, Hive, Spark)
  • Responsible AI & GenAI delivery
  • Multi-agent A2A pipeline design (skills → commands → workflows)
  • LLM orchestration: GPT-4o · Claude 4 · Anthropic MCP
  • RAG pipelines (LangChain, Pinecone, pgvector)
  • Data Governance & Security controls
  • Real-time decisioning & streaming
  • Entity resolution & classification

Cloud & Infrastructure

  • AWS & GCP architecture
  • Kubernetes, service mesh, containers
  • Terraform & infrastructure automation
  • CI/CD & progressive delivery
  • High-availability design & SRE
  • Performance and cost optimization

Leadership & Strategy

  • Org design & mentoring
  • Cross-functional stakeholder alignment
  • Regulatory & compliance readiness
  • Product discovery & roadmap shaping
  • Executive communications & storytelling
  • Vendor, audit & partner governance

Professional Experience

Director, Data and AI Governance

Jul 2019 - Present
Visa Inc., Foster City, CA
  • AI-Driven GRC Platform: Architected and shipped a production-grade agentic AI governance platform with 40+ agents, 1M+ lines of code, 450+ APIs, and 100+ features — cutting assessment review time by 95% and enabling a multi-million dollar revenue unlock. View live platform →
    • A2A Multi-Agent Pipeline: Designed a three-tier autonomous governance pipeline — 16 stateless skills → 6 command agents → 3 tiered workflows — with automated risk classification routing to Low Risk (2hr SLA), Full Review (5 business days), or Escalated (20 business days), plus a confidence-chain gate that prevents auto-approval below a 0.80 floor.
    • Claude AI & MCP Integration: Pioneered enterprise Model Context Protocol (MCP) integration exposing 5 GRC tools to Claude Code and Claude Desktop — enabling natural-language governance intake, submission, and end-to-end workflow orchestration without custom tooling. Supports both an Anthropic SDK autonomous agent CLI (Option A) and an MCP stdio server (Option B).
    • Privacy & Regulatory Automation: Automated GDPR DPIA/LIA assessments, EU AI Act high-risk classification, and privacy impact scoring via LLM — replacing weeks of manual legal review with sub-hour automated analysis at 0.85/0.88 confidence floors.
    • Blockchain Audit Registry: Deployed GRCAuditRegistry on Polygon Amoy (Ethereum L2) for tamper-proof, on-chain compliance evidence anchoring — providing immutable governance decisions for regulatory and audit submission.
    • Agentic Runtime v2: Built a deterministic 4D risk-scoring engine (Operational, Reputational, Data Sensitivity, Competitive) with 5 policy gates and contradiction detection — fully decoupled from LLM inference to guarantee auditable, reproducible governance decisions.
    • RAG-Powered Document Intelligence: LangChain + Pinecone + OpenAI pipeline enabling semantic search across governance policy documents — surfacing relevant precedents and policy requirements during live intake interviews.
  • Data & AI Governance Deputy Lead shaping Data Use Policy guidance, Responsible AI direction, and AI inventions—working closely with Privacy, Competition, Affiliates, and IP legal teams.
  • NextGen Merchant Data Platform: 3-year strategy capturing Merchant ↔ PayFac ↔ Acquirer relationships across 136M+ merchant locations globally, powered by GenAI/LLM models for entity detection, recognition, classification, and hyperlocal data.
  • Single Threaded Owner of 30+ big data products and platforms operating at 215B+ transactions Visa-wide.
  • Visa Self-Supported Core Hadoop 3.x: Owned vision, strategy, and execution; scaled team from 3 to 80+ members and saved $85M+ over 5 years.
  • Hadoop In-Place Upgrade: Presented 20+ roadshows; delivered upgrade across 175+ data applications, 90+ clusters, and 100s of PB.
  • Self-Service API Platform: PM-led build of an agent-based platform managing 12K+ servers via 1,500+ APIs (NodeJS/ReactJS). Onboarded 14 teams—reducing dev time from months to weeks.
  • External Audit: Presented and passed audit of the Hadoop program with the Federal Reserve, FBA, and government agencies.
  • Defined 3–5 year strategy across core data, serving, storage (HDFS/GPFS), cluster insights, governance, and catalog—plus the GCP cloud adoption strategy.

Senior Technical Manager — Hulu Platform Team

Mar 2016 - Jun 2019
Hulu, Santa Monica, CA
  • Managed Datastore Infrastructure providing Database-as-a-Service (MySQL, Cassandra, MongoDB across 250+ clusters), Redis caching (70TB / 2K clusters), and MSSQL (2k5 → 2k17).
  • Launched Hulu Live TV and led big-event datastore scaling for Super Bowl, Game of Thrones Finale, Winter Olympics, and NCAA—Cassandra at 1M+ qps and MySQL at 100K+ rps.
  • Led cross-functional AWS Cloud migration with 50+ scrum teams (cost estimates, compatibility, Terraform templating, datastore adoption, migration planning).
  • Drove cross-team collaboration across Cloud, NoC, Chaos, Security, Platform, DevOps, and Data Stores.
  • Presented datastore vision and platform strategy at broader forums and to C-level / executive audiences.

Senior Engineering Manager — Payments Activation & Onboarding

Aug 2009 - Mar 2016
Intuit, Woodland Hills, CA
  • Grew a high-performing engineering team from 2 to 12 engineers.
  • Owned development, architecture, design, CI/CD, and quality for payment activation across QuickBooks Online, GoPayment, QB Desktop, and QB PoS.
  • Major integrations: Adyen Payments (underwriting), Chase Payments, First Data, MasterCard sanctioned list, IP Commerce, ATT, Experian, OFAC, OpenText Case/Document/CRM.
  • Led complex Open Pricing initiative for QuickBooks across 6 scrum teams covering all SDLC stages.
  • Created market-ready products (Spark Lessons); led code jam, innovation jam, and idea jam events.
  • Won internal award for the most innovative idea—best of RESTful web services for customer problems.

Senior Software Engineer — MyCorporation by Intuit

Jan 2007 - Sep 2009
MyCorporation by Intuit, Calabasas, CA
  • Developed 37+ business creation products including LLCs, Corporations, and Copyrights.
  • Built the interview UI / billing portal using JSF; implemented Document and Workflow systems.

Senior Software Engineer — Procter & Gamble

May 2005 - Jan 2007
Procter & Gamble, Cincinnati, OH
  • Implemented data visualization using AJAX to create "Excel-like" online spreadsheets.
  • Released multiple project versions impacting 5,000+ manufacturing supplier companies.

Personal Projects & Open Innovations

Built and deployed full-stack applications as learning vehicles and proof-of-concept platforms — exploring agentic AI, real-time collaboration, and data management at production scale.

AI-Driven GRC Portal

Full-stack agentic governance platform — 40+ agents, A2A pipeline, Claude MCP integration, and blockchain audit registry.

React/Vite Node.js TypeScript PostgreSQL Solidity
View live →

Merchant Data Portal

NextGen merchant data source inventory and management portal exploring MDP architecture concepts.

React TypeScript REST APIs
View live →

CodeCollab Translate

Real-time code collaboration PoC with AI-powered translation across programming languages.

React Node.js WebSockets LLM
View live →

MyYaatra

Personal life chronicle with AI insights, family tree, memories, career milestones, and time capsules.

React/Vite TypeScript AI/ML
View live →

Education & Research

Master of Science in Computer Science

2005
University of Dayton, OH
Research: Created a new Congestion Aware protocol for wireless ad-hoc mobile networks, published in IEEE

Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science

2002
Visvesvaraya Technological University (JSSATE), India

Certifications & Professional Development

  • Agile/Scrum Master Certification (Intuit)
  • Cloud Architecture & Distributed Systems
  • Big Data Technologies & AI/ML Specializations

Key Achievements & Impact

Outcomes that demonstrate trusted delivery, talent growth, and industry influence.

GRC Platform Innovation

  • Autonomous A2A governance pipeline: 16 skills × 6 commands × 3 workflows — auto-approves low-risk assessments end-to-end in under 2 hours
  • First enterprise Claude MCP integration: 5 GRC tools exposed to Claude Code and Claude Desktop for natural-language governance orchestration
  • Blockchain audit provenance on Polygon Amoy (Ethereum L2) — tamper-proof, on-chain compliance record for regulatory submissions
  • Deterministic 4D risk engine + 5 policy gates decoupled from LLM inference — 100% auditable governance decisions
  • GDPR DPIA/LIA + EU AI Act compliance checks automated via LLM at production confidence floors (0.85/0.88)

Industry Recognition

  • Technology Innovation Award for Visa data architecture
  • Featured speaker at 10+ international big data & AI events
  • Author of 5+ peer-reviewed papers on distributed systems

Leadership Multipliers

  • Mentored 50+ engineers with 15+ stepping into leadership roles
  • Established best practices adopted by 100+ product squads
  • Scaled global teams with 40% increase in women in technical roles

Advisory & Ecosystem

  • Advisor to non-profits enabling underrepresented talent in tech
  • Technical mentor for early-stage AI founders
  • Active collaborator with policy, legal, and audit partners on AI governance

Let’s Collaborate

Share a challenge or opportunity and I’ll follow up within two business days.

Prefer email? Reach me directly at harish.raghav@gmail.com.

Languages

English · Native/Bilingual Language · Proficiency Level

References

Available upon request