From Bank Teller to GenAI Platform PM: A Career Built on Adapting
If you’d told me, standing behind a teller window at Axis Bank in Hyderabad processing savings account deposits, that I’d eventually be leading GenAI platform governance for a Fortune 500 pharmaceutical program, I don’t think I would have believed you. Not because it seemed impossible — but because at the time, I wasn’t thinking about a “career path” at all. I was thinking about getting the reconciliation right before close of business.
Looking back, that’s probably the throughline: every role I’ve held taught me something the next one needed, even when I couldn’t see the connection at the time. Banking operations taught me that process rigor isn’t bureaucracy for its own sake — it’s what protects customers and the institution when something goes wrong. HR taught me that no initiative succeeds without genuinely understanding the people executing it, not just the plan on paper. A brief detour into RF engineering, migrating LTE network sites for AT&T, taught me to read technical systems I hadn’t been trained on and ask the right questions of people who had. Coming back to banking as a personal banker and then an assistant branch manager taught me BSA/AML and KYC compliance from the inside, not from a training slide.
By the time I became a Scrum Master and then a Project Manager, I wasn’t starting from zero — I was drawing on a decade of oddly specific, oddly relevant experience that most PMs on a straight-line career path simply don’t have. When I sit in a room with Compliance, Risk, Engineering, and AI/ML teams all talking past each other, I’m not guessing at what each of them needs. I’ve sat in most of those chairs.
I don’t think this is a story about a “non-traditional path” being secretly better than a traditional one. It’s simpler than that: the skills compound if you let them. Every role added a lens I still use today — operational rigor from banking, empathy and process from HR, technical curiosity from telecom, and now, facilitation and governance from Agile delivery and GenAI program leadership.
If there’s a lesson in it for anyone looking at their own resume and seeing a set of jobs that don’t obviously connect: they connect more than you think. You just have to keep asking what each one taught you, and stay open to where that answer takes you next. Mine took me from a teller window to a GenAI governance table. I’m curious where it goes from here.