Ramkumar Palavelli

I build intelligent payment systems at scale, combining resilient microservices with Applied AI, both predictive and agentic, to move money smarter for millions of people.

Senior Engineering Manager, Consumer Payments at Wells Fargo Google Cloud Certified Generative AI Leader Master of Computer Applications and MBA San Francisco Bay Area

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About

I'm a senior engineering manager, architect and hands-on builder with more than 25 years in web applications, microservices and distributed systems. For the last several years I've led Consumer Payments services and experience APIs in the Bill Pay domain at Wells Fargo, including the rollout of instant payment APIs.

My focus now is Applied AI, and specifically getting it past the demo stage into systems a bank can actually run. In practice that means agents with real guardrails, retrieval grounded in data you can trust, and evaluation that tells you honestly whether the thing works. I'm doing that today on predictive payment APIs, and building toward owning that work at greater scope.

I finished my MBA at San Jose State in August 2026 to put some business grounding behind the engineering, and I like building teams where engineers keep learning. The work I want to keep growing into is Applied AI end to end, the business case as much as the architecture.

Applied AI and machine learning

  • Agentic orchestration
  • LangGraph
  • LangChain
  • MCP
  • RAG
  • LLM evaluation and testing
  • GCP Vertex AI
  • Gemini
  • Llama
  • Python
  • PyTorch
  • Predictive payment APIs

Platform and data

  • Java and J2EE
  • Microservices
  • REST and experience APIs
  • Event-driven architecture
  • Apache Kafka
  • Apache Flink
  • Google Cloud
  • Cloud migration
  • Test automation and Karate BDD
  • Relational and NoSQL data stores

Leadership

  • Engineering management
  • Mentoring and team growth
  • Strategic planning
  • Cross-functional delivery
  • Risk management
  • Agile and Six Sigma
  • Stakeholder communication

Awards and recognition

1st place

CT Global AI Code-a-Thon 2026

First place in category, May 2026 / Wells Fargo Consumer Technology

Our five-person team took first place in our category, out of more than 315 teams competing worldwide over two weeks to solve real enterprise problems with AI. We built CreditCheckBot on the internal DTI platform, and the judges singled out how pragmatic and scalable the architecture was.

  • Agentic orchestration across several reasoning steps, rather than one large prompt
  • Automated tests for how the agent behaves, including the paths where it goes wrong
  • An interface plain enough that the judges could try it themselves
  • Built to scale inside a platform that already existed, with all of its constraints

Semifinalist

GenAI Hackathon 2024

Reached semifinals, 2024

Built ESG survey automation on GCP Vertex AI, turning a manual questionnaire process into a workflow that drafted answers straight from source documents and then checked them.

Experience

Wells Fargo

2009 to present / San Francisco Bay Area

  1. Senior Engineering Manager

    Feb 2024 to present

    I lead Consumer Payments services and experience APIs in the Bill Pay domain. I led the instant payment API implementation, and I now spearhead the generative AI work behind predictive payment APIs.

  2. Engineering Manager

    Jun 2021 to Feb 2024

    Led the teams behind Consumer Payments services and experience APIs, growing engineers while shipping payment features on a steady roadmap. Also drove the move off a licensed third-party test tool, automating the conversion of roughly 8,000 test cases to Karate BDD instead of rewriting them by hand.

  3. Lead Software Engineer

    Apr 2012 to Jun 2021

    Led the modernization and modularization of payment applications so they could be reached from any channel through web services and APIs. I also owned the design and integration work for onboarding new clients, which cut our third-party support costs.

  4. Lead Software Engineer

    Sep 2009 to Mar 2012

    Built J2EE web applications and led the customer payments data migration for the Wachovia merger, processing roughly 10 million transactions inside a tight off-hours window.

Earlier career

Selected work

Agentic AI / 2026

CreditCheckBot

An agentic assistant for credit checks, built with a five-person team and awarded first place in category at the CT Global AI Code-a-Thon 2026. It reasons in multiple steps, has real tests around how it behaves, and keeps its interface plain on purpose, all while running inside an existing enterprise platform.

Generative AI / 2024

ESG survey automation

A workflow on GCP Vertex AI that drafts ESG questionnaire answers from source documentation and validates them, in place of a slow manual process. It reached the semifinals of the GenAI Hackathon 2024.

Payments platform

Instant payment APIs

Led the instant payment work in the Bill Pay domain, from the business services up through the experience APIs that consumer channels call. Money that moves in real time leaves very little room for latency or failure, and that shaped most of the design.

Cloud and modernization / current

Payments cloud migration

Ongoing work modernizing and modularizing critical payment applications so they run in the cloud and serve every consumer channel through a shared set of web services and APIs.

Test automation

Third-party test tool to Karate BDD migration

Roughly 8,000 test cases had to move off a licensed third-party test tool. Rather than rewrite them by hand, we built a framework that converted them to Karate BDD automatically. It dropped the vendor dependency, widened coverage and let the teams write new tests far faster.

Data migration

Wachovia to Wells Fargo payments migration

My first project at Wells Fargo, during the Wachovia merger. Led the development work for migrating customer profiles, accounts, payees and roughly 10 million payment records, in a single off-hours cutover window that could not run long.

Education and certifications

Master of Business Administration

San Jose State University, Lucas Graduate School of Business / MBA for Professionals / Completed Aug 2026

An executive-format program for working professionals, finished alongside a full-time engineering leadership role and ending with a strategy capstone. My second master's degree, this one in strategy, finance and leading organizations through change.

Executive MBA International Week

Cranfield School of Management, United Kingdom / Sep 2025

A week on global business innovation, run in partnership with San Jose State University, mixing industry visits with role-based strategy simulations.

Master of Computer Applications

Kakatiya University, Warangal, India / 1997 to 2000

A three-year postgraduate computing degree covering software engineering, algorithms, databases and systems design. This is where the fundamentals came from.

BSc, Electronics

Osmania University, Hyderabad, India

Certifications

Google Cloud Certified Generative AI Leader

Issued Sep 2025 / Valid through Sep 2028

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Google Cloud Professional Cloud Architect

Issued Oct 2022

Google Cloud Certified Cloud Digital Leader

Issued Sep 2022

Let's talk

Applied AI is what I work on and think about most. If you're building in the same area, I'd enjoy hearing from you.

Where I'm focused

  • Applied AI leadership across AI engineering and AI platform teams
  • Generative and agentic AI that actually runs in production
  • Payments, financial services and other regulated domains where AI has to be trustworthy