JPMorgan's payments CIO didn't retire after all

When JPMorgan's CTO Sri Shivananda stepped away from the role to become the bank's chief information officer (CIO) of payments last month, his predecessor Mike Blandina was understood to be retiring. It was a short retirement, however, as he's now resurfaced at a $48bn cloud technology company.

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Blandina has joined Snowflake as its chief information officer based in Menlo Park, California. He spent five years with JPMorgan, spent across Atlanta and Tampa. For Blandina, this is a pretty long time to spend at one company; he hadn't spent more than three years at any of his past seven employers, including google and crypto firm Bakkt.

At Snowflake, he replaces Sunny Bedi, the firm's CIO as well as chief data officer. Bedi spent five years in the roles, joining a few months before Blandina joined JPMorgan; prior to that, he was a 12-year NVIDIA alum. Instacart's Anahita Tafvizi was hired to assume Bedi's CDO responsibilities late last year.

Blandina isn't the only JPMorgan alum in the company. Jason Mills, Snowflake's VP of solutions engineering, spent ten years at the bank and was an executive director in big data machine learning and analytics. JPMorgan is a Snowflake client and uses its GenAI product, Cortex, to power Fusion, its data platform for institutional investors.

Working at Snowflake can be lucrative, especially for technical leadership roles. A Levels.fyi report last year suggested engineering managers there are the third highest paid EMs in the world, behind just Meta and Databricks. The offer must have been tempting to prise Blandina from his supposed retirement.