Technology

Engineering Leader Varun Shah’s Distinguished Career Has Transformed The Way Software Is Developed And Scaled Across the Technology Industry

The impact and contributions of versatile leaders seldom sets standards and benchmarks for industries. However, building a name for yourself in the software engineering world is quite challenging, as it is one of the most competitive industries with a plethora of engineering thought leaders and gifted software minds.

Varun Shah, a renowned technology leader, however has become an inspiration because of his remarkable contributions and the impact of his leadership in various Tech giants. He has held critical leadership roles at diverse technology behemoths for 15+ years and has caused paradigm shifts in data security and privacy across industries.

Varun’s curiosity and interest in the technology world started early on when he was pursuing his degree of Bachelor of Engineering in Information Technology, which he passed with first class distinction from L.D. Engineering College, Gujarat University.

Leveraging technology to solve crucial real-world challenges

Varun started his journey as a full stack software engineer at the technology giant Tata Consultancy Services and quickly rose to the position of the lead engineer with his critical thinking and leadership skills. His work was key behind the automation of state government manual paper-based workflow systems (IWDMS and IFMS), which were converted to fully technology driven electronic workflow systems. Varun’s work helped increase government officers’ efficiencies by 85% and reduced the grievances and appeals of the general public beneficiaries of the Government services on the system by 75%. The software was expanded into government systems in the UK, Uganda, Kenya, and Australia. 

After that, Varun worked as a lead software engineer at Cignex Technology in the US. During his time there, he led several projects for multinational companies like Sesame Street, yell.com, Posadas, EA sports, CalWORKs Information Network(CalWIN), and Toyota. Cignex Technology then assigned and sent Varun to the United States as a lead architect to manage and lead the project. There, he redesigned the Toyota owners’ portal. He led multiple engineering teams to implement Toyota owner’s portal which was launched under Varun’s leadership in November 2011. This portal was used by 40+ million Toyota car owners in the United States and helped Toyota’s service centers to reduce 60% US customer care calls by enabling Toyota vehicle owners to book car services through the Toyota owners’ portal rather than making phone calls.

He then joined Medimpact – one of the top 5 pharmacy benefit companies in the USA in August 2013 as an engineering leader where he managed the software engineering and quality assurance teams. He worked on healthcare solutions like e-prescribing which helps physicians to check patient’s insurance details and prescribe medications while helping optimize costs, reduce fraud, abuse and wastage of medications. 

Solutions developed by Varun helped Medimpact customers like insurance companies, government agencies, small and big employer groups to optimize prescription drug costs, provide better prescription coverage and reduce wastage of prescription for their members. He played a key role in developing a healthcare marketplace where multiple vendors can sell solutions like prescription discount programs, diabetes monitoring systems, asthma treatments, dental treatments, and vision treatments. Varun’s contributions directly helped decrease costs associated with healthcare and provide better facilities to Medimpact members. His work and its impact directly helped Medimpact win the prestigious PBMI Excellence Award for quality improvement.

Later in May 2021, Varun joined the world’s biggest video game company Sony PlayStation as an engineering leader where he played a critical role in revamping and upgrading PlayStation’s legacy payment gateway services architecture to a robust and more scalable architecture. Varun led the engineering team to build a heavy-duty payment gateway services architecture that seamlessly supports ~50 million PlayStation global subscribers and millions of payment transactions per day. His work at Sony PlayStation led to a ~ 55% reduction in charge backs and increased daily transactions by 15%.

Varun’s next set of contributions helped build his name and stature in the data privacy and security domain. After his time at Sony PlayStation, he joined ServiceNow where he led the successful implementation and launch of the ServiceNow Vault Data Anonymization product, all the way from the inception phase to launching the solution as part of the ServiceNow Platform (as a Service offering).

ServiceNow is serving 1.6k customers worldwide and the solution developed by Varun was one of the top platform security features integrated with the platform to help customers protect their sensitive data and increase security, privacy and compliance across the enterprise.

Varun is currently working as a software engineering manager at Amazon. He is the brains behind numerous futuristic and automated tools that Amazon has built and is building to help enhance life safety for Amazon’s worldwide 40K facilities and their thousands of employees. He is actively involved in hiring, mentoring and coaching Amazon’s future software engineers.

Mentoring and inspiring future software developers and change makers

Varun loves and enjoys the people-oriented nature of his work. He has experienced the invaluable value add and impact that mentors and coaches have in the personal and professional growth of engineers. 

Varun has been lending his expertise to a variety of mentoring platforms like Coffeemug, AdpList, PlatoHQ, MentorCruise and Topmate where he’s offering invaluable guidance to those seeking help. His work in AI and ML and his leadership style has become an inspiration for engineers who are starting/growing in their careers. Varun is also soon to launch his book titled “The Code Masters: Lessons from Trailblazing Leaders in Software Engineers” which will inspire and help leaders in the software engineering world to benefit from Varun’s knowledge, expertise, and experience in the industry.

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