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Mamtha Banerjee is the new leader of the JPMorgan Chase Seattle Tech Center. (JPMorgan Chase Photo)
JPMorgan Chase named a new leader of its Seattle Tech Center: Mamtha Banerjee, a computer scientist, business leader, and Seattle startup veteran who has worked for the financial services giant for more than two years.
Banerjee will join JPMorgan Chase’s Global Technology Center Leadership team as part of the role. The company’s Seattle Tech Center, established in 2018 to tap into the region’s tech talent pool, has grown to 380 people, focusing on areas including cybersecurity, cloud technologies, artificial intelligence, and machine learning.
JPMorgan Chase has benefitted in part from cutbacks and changes at the region’s tech giants and startups, creating a more fluid labor market in recent years. Even for people coming from large tech companies, the scope and nature of the challenges at JPMorgan Chase can present a unique opportunity, Banerjee said in an interview.
“The scale is huge, and the resiliency requirements are massive,” she said.
Her new role comes at a pivotal moment for the company’s workforce and its return to the office. Asked about the implications of JPMorgan’s plan to bring employees back to the office five days a week, company officials in Seattle this week said they were awaiting details about what that will mean for specific locations.
Mamtha Banerjee at TechStars Seattle Demo Day in 2014. (GeekWire File Photo)
Banerjee was the founder and CEO of InvestmentYogi from 2008 to 2012 and Magicflix from 2013 to 2015, a role for which she was featured in GeekWire as part of the 2014 TechStars Seattle accelerator program.
In her new role, Banerjee will oversee strategy, innovation, talent and community engagement for the Seattle Tech Center, according to an internal announcement about her appointment. She will also continue in her current role as head of the Core Platform Engineering team in the company’s Consumer & Community Banking unit.
Rao Lakkakula, who previously led the JPMC Seattle tech hub, joined Microsoft in October 2024.
Working with Banerjee in the role will be Kristine Baker, Seattle Technology Center manager, who also supported Lakkakula during his tenure as the Seattle Tech Center leader.
Banerjee that she hopes to see more products emerging from the Seattle Tech Center, particularly in areas like AI, cloud, and other platform engineering technologies. While cloud security remains a major focus of the hub, it has also been growing its platform engineering team more recently.
