The FINANCIAL — Global technology platform and payments leader PayPal Holdings, Inc. on February 9 announced the appointment of Sri Shivananda as the company’s new Senior Vice President and Chief Technology Officer, effective April 1, 2016.
Shivananda’s appointment follows the decision by current CTO, James Barrese, to step down to take time off. James will remain with PayPal for a period of time to support a smooth transition period, according to PayPal.
With James’ departure, PayPal will realign responsibilities within the company. As CTO, Sri will oversee the company’s platform and infrastructure with a focus on availability, scalability, performance and information security. The company’s Payments and Identity teams will move under the Product and Engineering organization, enabling a stronger end-to-end view of PayPal’s customer experience as the company launches new capabilities.
“I am very pleased to welcome Sri to our leadership team as our next CTO,” said Dan Schulman, President and CEO of PayPal. “Sri has demonstrated outstanding leadership qualities and has been responsible for effectively running our critically important online payments systems around the world. He has the right skillset to allow us to remain at the forefront of innovation in the payments industry.”
“I am excited to take on this role and look forward to partnering with Dan and the leadership team to continue growing and improving our technology platform,” Shivananda said. “Our technology enables us to be a Customer Champion as the partner of choice to merchants and by empowering consumers globally – and I am committed to bringing our vision fully to life.”
During his nearly 15-year tenure at the company, Shivananda led eBay’s Global Platform and Infrastructure (GPI) team that powered both the eBay Inc. and PayPal businesses. After successfully guiding his team through separation, Sri joined PayPal as VP of GPI reporting to Barrese. In this role, Sri was responsible for all core technologies covering PayPal’s data centers, internal private cloud, online and offline data infrastructure, internal developer frameworks and tools, and various platform services.
Schulman added, “James has made invaluable contributions to our organization including overseeing a transformation of PayPal’s technology platform, which strengthened our competitive advantages and helped pave the path for PayPal’s growth and success. As a result of his leadership, we have significantly improved our security and performance – all foundational to being a true global Customer Champion. We are grateful to James for the team he has built and his long-standing commitment to PayPal. We wish James all the best with his well-deserved time off.”
“It has been an honor to work with the incredible talent across PayPal, and I am happy to see Sri take on greater responsibilities that are perfectly aligned with his strengths as a leader,” Barrese said. “We have an extremely deep bench of expertise on our technology team, and I’m confident Sri is well prepared and positioned to ensure PayPal’s technology platform remains at the leading edge as PayPal continues to define the future of digital payments.”
Discussion about this post