About
Payments Platform Architect at the IBM Payments Center (Nov 2025–present). Sixteen years at IBM — three as a technical co-op during my B.Eng., then thirteen years full-time since 2013 — across software, cloud for regulated workloads, and, most recently, payments.
I am Priyank Narvekar, a Payments Platform Architect and Engineering Lead / People Manager at the IBM Payments Center. I joined the Payments Center in November 2025. My current work concentrates on payments platform architecture — CIAM performance and observability at scale on OpenShift, dedicated Payments-as-a-Service instances for regulated banks, and the DevSecOps and Zero Trust posture those environments demand. It is a recent move; I am new to payments as a domain, not to regulated cloud.
The six years before that were IBM Cloud — Senior Software Engineer on IBM Cloud for Financial Services. That work sat under payments platforms rather than inside them: regulated landing zones, ISV enablement across 45 vendors (with 8 reaching production for BNP Paribas), reference architectures on OpenShift and Virtual Servers, and a deployment methodology that became US Patent 11,755,717 B2 and now ships as IBM Cloud Deployable Architectures. During those years I also shipped platform fixes as far up the stack as IBM Cloud Object Storage on Project Vela — the AI supercomputer used by IBM Research.
The full-time years before that at IBM Software (2013–2019) were general software and platform engineering — the second-generation Cloud Fabric prototype, Cisco integrations (Kinetic IoT for the Port of Rotterdam, Watson Workspace), a Watson-integrated commenting service later productized in IBM Connections, and Java ETL and Cognos work earlier on. Not payments, not financial services specifically; the resume has the full sequence. Before that, I started at IBM as a technical co-op in January 2010 while completing my B.Eng., shipping ETL against 10M PMR records daily, Cognos extensions, and an Apache Lucene integration for the BPM samples corpus — the work that turned into a full-time offer in 2013.
I studied at Memorial University of Newfoundland — B.Eng. in Computer Engineering (2013), MBA (2018), and an MSc in Computer Science (2024) with a thesis on bio-inspired robotics, published in Artificial Life and Robotics. Outside client work I write, mentor engineers earlier in the ladder, and read more incident post-mortems than is probably healthy.
Where to reach me
Email is [email protected]. For work matters, LinkedIn is the fastest. The resume has the full history; the writing is where I think in public.