---
title: "Savita Nikam - Director - Chapter Lead, Quality Engineering & Banking Lending Portfolio in Pune Division | Tal"
description: "Meet Savita Nikam, Technology Director | Quality Engineering & Technology Transformation Leader | BFSI Platforms | Intelligent Automation, DevOps & AI-Driven Testing | Program & Delivery Leadership based in Pune Division. AI stack includes codex, cursor, and opencode."
image: "https://tal.club/meet/savita-nikam/share-image"
---

# Savita Nikam on Tal

## Headline

Technology Director \| Quality Engineering & Technology Transformation Leader \| BFSI Platforms \| Intelligent Automation, DevOps & AI\-Driven Testing \| Program & Delivery Leadership

## About

Over 2 decades of experience across Banking, Financial Services, Insurance, Wealth Management, & Digital Payments, with a career shaped by working in complex, regulated environments where delivery reliability & system stability are critical\. Progressed from hands\-on engineering roles into enterprise leadership, with a consistent focus on improving how technology is built, tested, and released at scale\. Currently leading Quality Engineering for WMA banking\-Lending portfolio within UBS, working closely with product, engineering, and business teams across geographies\. Playing key role in strengthening release governance, improving delivery predictability, and introducing more structured, automation\-led ways of working, while navigating the realities of legacy systems, evolving requirements, and high production accountability\. Earlier experience across Mastercard and Accenture involved building shared automation capabilities, bringing consistency to fragmented engineering practices, and supporting large\-scale banking and payments programs\. This includes exposure to product\-led environments as well as consulting\-led transformations, shaping a balanced approach to execution and stakeholder alignment\. Known for Influencing delivery across 30\+ teams, 3000\+ engineers, and diff global locations, strengthening engineering collaboration and governance\. Expertise & Operating Approach • Driving structured, scalable quality engineering in regulated environments • Establishing practical automation and engineering discipline across teams • Strengthening release governance and delivery predictability • Enabling DevOps and CI/CD as part of everyday delivery • Working across product, engineering, and business to align outcomes • Building capable teams that can operate independently at scale Leadership Philosophy Believes sustainable delivery comes from clarity, discipline, and ownership\. Focuses on building systems and teams that can operate reliably without constant intervention, while keeping decision\-making grounded in business impact rather than process for its own sake\. CERTIFICATIONS & PROFESSIONAL CREDENTIALS PMP & PMI\-ACP \| SAFe Certified Practitioner – Scaled Agile \| ISTQB & CSTM \| Lean Six Sigma Yellow Belt \| Oracle Certified Java Programmer \(OCJP\) \| Microsoft Azure Cloud Certification \| RFT Automation Certification \| ITIL Training \| UBS AI Citizen \| UBS Gold CE

## Location

Pune Division

## AI stack

codex

cursor

opencode

## Work experience

Director \- Chapter Lead, Quality Engineering & Banking Lending Portfolio at UBS, Jul 2020 \- Present · 6 yrs 2 mos, Pune, Maharashtra, India, Lead enterprise quality engineering for UBS’s Wealth Management Americas \(WMA\) banking portfolio, spanning a large, complex estate of applications supporting core banking capabilities across mortgages, lending, deposits, cards, and private banking\. Partner with product, engineering, and business leadership across global locations to modernise testing practices, strengthen release governance, and drive transformation within a highly regulated banking environment\. Drive automation\-led quality transformation by scaling adoption, embedding CI/CD and shift\-left practices, and introducing AI\-driven testing to improve delivery speed, stability, and efficiency\. Standardised quality practices across teams, established governance and reporting discipline, and modernised the automation stack while enabling more predictable releases, stronger production resilience, and optimised operating models across distributed engineering teams\. Key Achievements ➤ Expanded automation adoption to 85%\+, reducing regression effort by \~50% and improving delivery predictability\. ➤ Reduced end\-to\-end testing cycle from \~2 months to 3–4 weeks and accelerated release velocity by 35–50%\. ➤ Delivered 70–90% productivity gains through AI\-driven test automation and enabled \~50% QA optimisation ➤ Reduced production defect leakage by up to \~95% through stronger engineering controls and proactive quality governance\. ➤ Strengthened DevOps and cloud\-based testing practices, improving environment stability and increasing pipeline execution capacity

Test Architect Engineering Manager at Accenture, Aug 2019 \- Jul 2020 · 1 yr, Pune/Pimpri\-Chinchwad Area, Drove automation transformation and quality engineering strategy for PNC Bank retail banking portfolio, supporting a large\-scale delivery environment spanning 80\+ applications and distributed engineering teams\. Partnered with client and delivery leadership to standardise fragmented testing practices, introduce a unified automation approach, and embed CI/CD\-driven quality engineering across complex banking platforms\. Established a centralised automation model through QFaaS, enabling consistent testing practices and improved reuse across teams\. Transitioned delivery from manual and local testing to pipeline\-driven execution, strengthening release confidence and feedback cycles\. Integrated DevOps practices into QE workflows, improving scalability, stabilising test environments, and enabling more predictable, efficient delivery across distributed programs\. Key Achievements ➤ Reduced regression cycle timelines from \~1\.5 months to \~3 weeks, accelerating release readiness\. ➤ Reduced test execution effort by \~45% through automation standardisation and parallel execution\. ➤ Improved automation stability and reuse, lowering maintenance overhead by \~30%\.

Manager of Software Engineering at Mastercard Mobile Transaction Solutions, Mastercard Technology Pvt\. Ltd\., Jul 2015 \- Aug 2019 · 4 yrs 2 mos, Pune Division, Maharashtra, India, Manager – Product Development & Innovation \| May 2018 – Aug 2019 Consultant / Practice Lead \| Jul 2015 – May 2018 Drove quality engineering and product innovation across Mastercard’s digital payments ecosystem, partnering with global product and engineering teams to improve release reliability and streamline testing practices across multiple platforms\. Enabled more stable, scalable payment integrations by embedding automation\-led practices into core delivery workflows\. Owned the quality strategy for the Mobile Payment SDK \(Android & iOS\), aligning roadmap, release governance, and automation across mobile and API layers\. Built and scaled the Mastercard Test Automation Framework \(MTAF\), replacing fragmented approaches with a unified, reusable automation model, while establishing a central QE capability that strengthened engineering productivity, enabled DevOps adoption, and improved delivery execution across global programs\. Key Achievements ➤ Reduced release cycle timelines by \~40% through CI/CD enablement and integrated automation practices\. ➤ Delivered \~50% productivity improvement and significantly faster test execution through enterprise automation standardisation\. ➤ Built and scaled a 250\+ member global QE organisation, establishing a strong automation capability and talent pipeline\.

Senior Software Engineer at Courion IT PVT LTD, Pune, May 2011 \- Jul 2015 · 4 yrs 3 mos, Baner, Pune, Domain: Access Assurance, Administration, Governance Courion delivers identity and access management \(IAM\) solutions that serve as the core pillar of an organization's governance, risk and compliance \(GRC\) strategy\. Courion's Access Assurance Suite solution addresses the essential business processes to define, verify, and enforce access to sensitive information through identity and access governance \(access certification, role life\-cycle management, remediation\) and access administration \(user provisioning, self\-service password management\)\. Led quality engineering for Identity & Access Management solutions, introducing automation and API testing while driving Agile delivery as Scrum Master\.

System Software Engineer at IBM ISL, Apr 2006 \- May 2011 · 5 yrs 2 mos, Pune, Project Name: Lotus Notes/Domino Product IBM Lotus Notes is not just only the mailing purpose product but it’s a collaborative product, its Integration of PIM application, Domino Designer, Administrator, Sametime Connect \(Chat tool\), Connection, Activities, Feeds, Symphony \(Document, Spreadsheet, Presentation\) and much more\. IBM Lotus Notes is an application designing and development tool\. It uses Backend database Lotus Domino, Lotus script named programming script and UI based designing tool which enables application design and development in Lotus Notes\. Hannover is an enhanced version of lotus notes with the flavours of java\-based technologies\. Contributed to enterprise product quality for Lotus Notes/Domino, designing test strategies and building automation suites for large\-scale systems

## Education

Executive MBA, Finance, General, Symbiosis institute of Management Studies

PGDCA, Pune university

[View the original profile](https://tal.club/meet/savita-nikam)

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