Leadership & Consulting — Arunkumar Amaran

Leadership Philosophy

As a Senior Technology Leader, I believe in leading through technical depth, strategic clarity, and genuine investment in people. My approach to leadership is grounded in hands-on engineering — I stay close to the architecture and the teams building it, ensuring that technical decisions are pragmatic, scalable, and aligned to business outcomes.

At Macy's, I lead cross-functional data engineering initiatives touching every major business domain — from Merchandising and Marketing to Supply Chain and Finance. I work with engineers, data scientists, and business stakeholders to translate complex data challenges into intelligent, automated solutions.

Beyond industry, I extend my leadership into academia and the global research community — serving on Technical Program Committees for international IEEE and Springer conferences, evaluating cutting-edge research and helping shape the direction of AI and computing science worldwide.

Leadership at a Glance

Current RoleTechnology Manager, Macy's

Team ScopeEnterprise Data & Analytics

TPC Conferences4 International Conferences

Papers Reviewed80+ (as Chair/Reviewer)

Awards JudgedGlobee Awards, KSU Events

Enterprise Technology Leadership

Leading large-scale data and AI transformation at Fortune 500 retailers

Nov 2023 – Present

Macy's Systems & Technology — Technology Manager

Data Engineering & Architecture Leadership

Responsible for the strategic direction and execution of Macy's enterprise data platform modernization. Lead cross-domain data engineering across Merchandising, Marketing, Finance, Digital, Supply Chain, Customer, and Pricing business units. Key leadership initiatives:

Directed the design and rollout of AI-based automation of Data Engineering Pipelines, reducing manual processing by significant margins
Led development of a Data Insights AI driver for customer behaviour analysis and demand predictions at enterprise scale
Championed predictive inventory management initiatives combining ML models with real-time event data
Introduced AI-driven predictive observability to improve operational efficiency and pipeline SLA reliability
Built and led the adoption of agentic AI frameworks, enabling automated code generation and modernization across teams
Established data quality governance standards and implemented observability dashboards for data freshness and completeness

Nov 2018 – Oct 2023

Macy's Systems & Technology — Staff Data Engineer

Data Platform Modernization & Team Leadership

Led the Data as a Service (DaaS) team's migration of enterprise data infrastructure from on-prem Hadoop to GCP and Azure. Drove architectural decision-making for lift-and-shift vs. rewrite trade-offs across three major Hadoop cluster migrations. Mentored engineers on cloud-native patterns and streaming data systems. Delivered the Customer 360 platform enabling personalized experiences across Macy's entire customer base.

Jan 2015 – Oct 2016

Randstad Technologies / Macy's

Lead Developer — Onshore Technical Lead

Led onshore development team for MAIN Analytics — Macy's Next-generation Enterprise Managed Information Platform. Responsible for requirement analysis, architecture decisions, and cross-team coordination to deliver holistic management of Product, Inventory, Sales, Price, Associate, and Offers information domains.

Feb 2013 – Jan 2015

Tata Consultancy Services — The Home Depot

Lead Developer — Supply Chain Visibility

Led development of the Emergency Visibility system — a critical supply chain platform used to track high-priority freight (generators, emergency supplies) during natural disasters. Designed overall application architecture in collaboration with Enterprise IT Architects. Coordinated QA teams for system testing and production deployments on Tomcat Grid server environments.

Technical Program Committee

Serving on the scientific review bodies of international IEEE and Springer conferences

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BDAA 2025 — Big Data Analytics and Applications

Technical Program Committee Member
Innsbruck, Austria

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CCNCPS 2026 — Communication, Computing, Networking & Cyber-Physical Systems

Technical Program Committee Member
Dubai, UAE

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ASPAI 2026 — Advances in Signal Processing and Artificial Intelligence

Technical Program Committee Member
Palma de Mallorca, Spain

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ICAIE 2026 — Artificial Intelligence and Education

Technical Program Committee Member
Taicang, Suzhou, China

Consulting & Advisory

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Cloud Data Strategy

Advisory on cloud-native data architecture, GCP ecosystem adoption, migration strategies (Hadoop to cloud), and multi-cloud platform design for enterprise organizations.

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AI & Automation Enablement

Guidance on implementing agentic AI frameworks, generative AI for operational efficiency, trustworthy AI systems design, and AI-driven data pipeline automation.

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Data Engineering Architecture

Technical consulting on real-time streaming architectures, data lake design, observability platforms, and enterprise-scale ingestion framework engineering.

Consulting engagements and client work — additional details to be added.