When Razorpay's payment infrastructure held 99.99% uptime through the 2023 festive season at 5 crore transactions per second at peak — an achievement the National Payments Corporation of India later cited as a benchmark for the industry — Sunita Patel had been Chief Technology Officer for barely a year. She was appointed to the role in 2022, the first woman to hold it at a major Indian fintech unicorn, after joining as VP Engineering in 2020.
"Scale breaks everything. Every assumption, every shortcut, every piece of technical debt — scale finds it, eventually. The only answer is to build right the first time."
Her twenty-two years in payments technology began as an engineer at ICICI Bank, continued through VP Engineering and CTO roles at PayU, and now spans an engineering organisation of over 500 people at Razorpay, building infrastructure that processes payments for more than eight million Indian businesses in a regulatory environment that shifts faster than almost any other in the world.
She scaled her engineering team from 120 to 320 people within eighteen months of joining Razorpay — organisational growth she has said is harder than any technical problem she has solved. She graduated from IIT Bombay with the institute gold medal, first in her class across the entire institute.
Forbes India named her to its 50 Women in Tech list in 2023. She serves on the advisory board of three early-stage fintech companies and mentors through the GirlScript Foundation.
CTO, Razorpay Software Pvt Ltd; Advisory Board, 3 fintech startups; and Mentor, GirlScript Foundation.
Payments Infrastructure at Scale; Engineering Organisational Design; and Women in Technology Leadership.
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