Shashank Karulkar brings 25+ years of experience in enterprise data architecture, platform modernization, and delivery leadership across banking, insurance, and mortgage lending.
His core expertise spans large-scale legacy-to-modern platform migrations — including Oracle 11g to 19c upgrades across six OLTP databases, SAS to SAS GRID re-platforming, and Informatica-to-AbInitio conversions — all delivered with zero major production incidents, alongside multi-tenant Hadoop platform builds and AWS cloud modernization for a US consumer bank. Earlier in his career, he worked on system landscapes with direct mainframe interfacing, including a PowerBuilder/Sybase client-server solution architected for HSBC that integrated with mainframe backends, and led the ETL design for a Barclays mainframe-facing initiative (CR07 Section-17 tax reporting) producing EBCDIC-format batch interfaces for correspondence and compliance data. He specifically designed these interfaces to be generic and metadata-driven, so that changes to the mainframe copybook structure could be absorbed as a configuration change in the interfacing code rather than requiring a redesign or redevelopment effort.
Most recently, as Senior Vice President at Barclays Global Services, Shashank scaled a data architecture and delivery organization from 8 to 100+ associates while serving concurrently as product owner for a major Oracle platform upgrade and delivery manager for a SAS GRID migration — the same discipline of governed, large-scale, zero-downtime legacy transformation that underpins mainframe modernization programs. Today, as Head of Solutions and Design for the Data Analytics and AI practice at Apexon, he leads client-facing pre-sales, solutioning, and technical strategy for large-scale data and AI transformation programs, including agentic AI-driven modernization accelerators, across engagements spanning banking, healthcare, and financial services clients. He is Certified SAFe Agilist and a Barclays-certified Enterprise Design Authority architect.
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