Smruti Patel

Patel offers more than 15 years of engineering leadership experience to Apollo, having previously led infrastructure teams at Stripe and VMWare.

Patel joined Stripe in early 2018, leading a cloud efficiency team, to optimize their overall infrastructure spend. She envisioned a “shift left” engineering culture to design highly performant and efficient Stripe products with economies of scale, and built the Latency, Efficiency, Attribution and Performance group. She moved on to lead the Data Platform engineering organization which hosts the underlying big data, async and stream processing infrastructure for Stripe’s mission-critical business, while ensuring its security, compliance, reliability, and efficiency.

Under Patel’s leadership, the Data Platform brought dozens of discrete products under its umbrella and scaled the team from 30 people to nearly 180. The Data Platform organization now also maintains Stripe’s public search API, operates key internal data solutions, and supports core data quality tooling and abstractions. Before Stripe, Patel spent 11 years at VMWare building the company's enterprise disaster recovery solution, and led a cloud-based data protection initiative.