Engineering Leadership · Innovation · Strategy

Hari
Babu

VP, Software Engineering

24+ years driving innovation at the intersection of technology strategy and product engineering. Building high-performing teams and cloud-native platforms that scale — from IBM to Abercrombie & Fitch to NetJets.

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24+
Years of Experience
IBM | Abercrombie & Fitch | NetJets
$30M
Annual Cost Savings
Domain-driven tech consolidation at A&F
X
Enterprise Transformations
Championed and led multiple transformational initiatives

Professional Experience

NetJets
May 2023 — Present
VP, Software Engineering
  • Provide technology leadership across Digital Engineering, Owner Services, and Sales & Marketing through cross-functional capability-based pods aligned to organizational vision.
  • Leading software engineering across one of the world's largest private aviation companies, driving platform strategy, team excellence, and technology innovation.
Abercrombie
& Fitch
Jun 2015 — May 2023 · 8 yrs
Head of Technology Strategy & Architecture
  • Led strategy for Unified Commerce and Loyalty portfolios, achieving double-digit revenue growth through consumer-facing innovation.
  • Spearheaded migration from legacy monoliths to cloud microservices and event streams — improving peak-load scalability by 3× and system availability to 99.99%.
  • Championed OKR adoption across engineering, improving development velocity by 60% through measurable outcomes and a culture of experimentation.
  • Optimized global technology spend, saving over $30MM / year through a scalable domain-based single source of truth.
IBM
Dec 2002 — May 2015 · 13 yrs
Senior Engineering Manager, Software Group
  • Managed and mentored large-scale geographically distributed engineering teams, retaining top talent through multiple corporate acquisitions.
  • Core member of the product team responsible for design and development of extensible Supply Chain and Commerce platforms used by major global retailers.
  • Led implementation of eCommerce, POS, Payments, Sterling OMS, WMS, omnichannel, and supply chain solutions for major US and international retailers.
  • Established strong customer and product relationships to align roadmaps with market demand; provided technology evaluation leadership.

Core Competencies

◈
Software Engineering Leadership
Leading world-class engineering teams to build scalable, resilient platforms and products with reliability, scalability, and security.
⬡
Technology Strategy & Architecture
Balancing long-term strategic vision with pragmatic execution roadmaps. Proactively managing technical debt and guiding infrastructure evolution at scale.
◎
Innovation & Transformation
Translating business ideas into technology solutions, driving innovation, transformation & modernization at scale.
⬗
Technical Excellence
API-first microservices, cloud-native architecture, high-scale distributed systems, AI/ML integration, and cross-functional partnership with Product, Design, and Data Science.
◇
Product Engineering
Leading consumer-facing applications, digital commerce, MarTech, loyalty, payments, ERP, supply chain, content recommendation, and user personalization systems.
⬙
Talent & Mentorship
Recruiting, mentoring, and building cross-functional high-performing engineering teams.

Contact

Let's build something
exceptional.

Open to conversations about engineering leadership, technology strategy, and building teams that ship at scale.

Email hari@haribabu.com → LinkedIn linkedin.com/in/hbabu → Web haribabu.com →