Meron Bersufekad
VP of Product Engineering — Platform & Payments
New York, NY
About
I lead engineering organizations through the unglamorous, high-stakes work: migrating platforms without downtime, rebuilding payments infrastructure under regulatory pressure, and turning a room full of senior engineers into a team that ships. Fifteen years in, my job is still mostly the same — reduce risk, then reduce it again.
Skills
Selected Work
Ledger Core Migration
ObjectiveReplaced a 12-year-old monolithic ledger with an event-sourced core across 40+ downstream services, live, with zero customer-facing downtime.
ApproachRole: Executive sponsor and lead architect. Approach: shadow-wrote every transaction to both systems for 6 weeks, diffed continuously, and cut over service-by-service behind a flag instead of a single big-bang migration.
Real-Time Fraud Layer
ObjectiveBuilt and shipped a real-time transaction scoring layer that cut fraud losses while keeping false-decline rates flat — a trade-off the prior vendor solution couldn't hit.
ApproachRole: Product owner, working directly with Risk and Compliance. Approach: replaced the batch nightly scoring job with a streaming model, then spent more time tuning the false-decline threshold than the model itself.
Engineering Org Redesign
ObjectiveRestructured a 60-engineer org from feature teams into platform + product pods, cutting cross-team lead time and giving every pod a real owner.
ApproachRole: Sole decision-maker, ratified by the CTO. Approach: ran the redesign as a 90-day pilot with two pods before rolling it out company-wide, so the model was proven, not just proposed.
Experience
VP, Product Engineering
Own platform, payments and data engineering (60 engineers, 5 directors). Report directly to the CEO on roadmap, headcount and risk.
Director of Engineering
Took platform engineering from 8 to 30 engineers through a Series C and a HIPAA compliance overhaul.
Senior Staff Engineer
Led the logistics-routing rewrite that became the company's core competitive advantage for six years.
Education
Cornell University
Languages
What People Say
Dana ran our platform migration like a program, not a project — scope, risk and stakeholders were tracked as carefully as the code.
References
Direct manager, 2017 — 2021
Former colleague, 2013 — 2017
Let's talk about your platform.
Available for advisory engagements, fractional VP roles, and platform reviews.