Mirella Batista

Chief of Staff to Global Head of Corporate Strategy

IBM | Mar 2025 – Present

Responsible for strengthening and evolving IBM Corporate Strategy's operating rhythm, enhancing visibility, execution discipline, and leadership accessibility across high-priority initiatives.

• Operating Cadence: Partner directly with the Global Head of Strategy to run and continuously refine the organization's operating cadence, including planning, prioritization, execution tracking, and executive communications across complex, cross-cutting initiatives.
• Execution Coordination: Design and institutionalize mechanisms that surface dependencies and overlap across parallel workstreams, driving coordinated execution and improved organizational clarity.
• Agile Adaptation: Adapt agile practices for non-engineering teams to improve scoping and planning discipline, and create structured forums that increase visibility, contribution, and accountability across project teams.
• Leadership Visibility: Expand leadership visibility and feedback loops by introducing structured AMA sessions and recurring skip-level engagements, strengthening engagement and supporting leadership pipeline development.
• Executive Readiness: Drive preparation for external engagements and client-facing presentations, defining objectives, tailoring strategic narratives to audience context, and equipping the Global Head of Strategy with executive-ready messaging.

Senior Technical Staff Member (STSM), CIO Software & Developer Experience

IBM | July 2022 – Mar 2025

Led the IBM CIO Software & Developer Experience Advocacy Program supporting platforms used by ~250,000 employees, driving modernization, engineering standards, and large-scale enablement across UI platforms, internal products, and developer tooling.

• Strategic Coverage: Drove 100% coverage of strategic engineering priorities (application modernization, CI/CD, automation, AI adoption) within five months through structured, outcome-focused enablement.
• Stakeholder Alignment: Established transparent stakeholder operating rhythms, including bi-weekly executive interlocks and measurable program metrics, increasing alignment and trust across leadership.
• Developer Advocacy: Built and scaled a developer advocacy model that strengthened SME engagement and cross-platform adoption.
• Global Transformation: Enabled mainframe modernization at scale by upskilling 100 developers across five regions and supporting the migration of 42 applications within five months.
• Technical Strategy & Mentorship: Defined and published 30+ DevSecOps and SRE principles, mentoring 20–30 engineers and delivering technical workshops to audiences of up to 600.

Manager, CIO Mobile Engineering

IBM | May 2021 to July 2022

Led mobile engineering for a high-traffic internal product, improving quality, performance, and delivery velocity.

• Strategic Hiring: Scaled the team by 50% through strategic hiring, achieving 100% two-year retention and strengthening organizational health.
• Accelerated Transformation: Modernized delivery by introducing DevOps and CI/CD practices, significantly increasing release frequency and system resilience.
• Improved Application Performance: Eliminated user-visible network errors, reduced mobile app screen flicker by 90% through intelligent caching, and strengthened QA practices to materially reduce defects.

VP, Head of Channel Integration for USCB Product Technology

Barclays US Consumer Bank | May 2019 to May 2021

Led UI engineering for high-scale consumer banking web and mobile platforms, managing ~60 engineers across five teams with full accountability for delivery, quality, and reliability.

• Platform Delivery: Delivered major consumer-facing capabilities across web and mobile platforms.
• Reduction in Development Time: Reduced time-to-market by 40% through micro-frontend architecture, incremental delivery, and modernization of UI systems.
• Business Impact: Partnered with Product and UX to launch self-service features that reduced call-center volume.
• Engineer Skillset Growth: Increased critical skill coverage by 80% during a hiring freeze through a scalable Learn-Do-Teach capability model.
• Organizational Resilience: Led teams through rapid organizational change during COVID while maintaining delivery focus and team stability.

Senior Software Engineer

Comcast (formerly iControl Networks) | August 2010 to April 2019

Early engineer on consumer home-automation products integrating hardware, mobile, and real-time systems that became part of Comcast's Xfinity Home platform.

• App Ecosystem: Designed and built 10 foundational consumer applications forming the core product ecosystem.
• Cross-Platform Development: Developed multi-brand, multi-language mobile applications deployed at scale.
• Technical Innovations: Engineered real-time UI systems supporting security events, video streaming, and device telemetry.
• Startup Growth: Contributed to product growth and platform maturity through rapid iteration in a startup environment.

UI Design and Development

Various clients | 1998 to 2010

Visual design and development of websites and Adobe Flash animations.