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Juan Felipe Mejia won’t wait to be handed a roadmap. He knows AI is fundamentally changing how his industry works, and yet he knows that his two decades of expertise in the space are invaluable in understanding how to deploy that technology for the betterment of an organization. The current senior director of global sales compensation strategy and operations at UiPath has built teams and deployed comp structures from scratch enough times to know what kind of repeatable tasks AI can handle, and how to give back time to employees to focus on higher-level work.
“The people running the operations understand where the friction really is, and they’re the ones who know how to remove it,” Mejia says simply. He’s focused his own continual education on examining just how AI can impact UiPath, and more holistically, his industry as a whole—modeling incentives, forecasting payout liability, identifying plan-design gaps, and helping the industry respond to market shifts faster than any manual process ever could.
A Different World View
Mejia is shaping how a global, high-growth tech company like UiPath rewards and focuses its revenue engine. But his expertise spans a much wider range. The Colombian native has built and maintained complex comp and incentives operations, many of which were in global roles, in broadcasting (Univision), banking (JPMorgan Chase), tech (Intralinks), publishing (Wiley), and now agentic automation and AI at UiPath—a company that has evolved well beyond its robotic process automation roots into a platform that combines AI agents, robots, and people to automate complex enterprise workflows.
“When I come to the table, I think I look at a problem in a very different way than someone who has only spent their career in tech,” the senior director explains. “I have a pretty clear view of what companies across a variety of industries have done, and I’m able to apply that thinking in a more diversified way. I think it helps find better solutions.”
Those solutions can have massive implications. In his current role, Mejia has helped drive a 40% cut in manual processes and nearly $25 million in incremental revenue through incentive redesign and modernization.
“The people running the operations understand where the friction really is, and they’re the ones who know how to remove it.”
Juan Felipe Mejia
What’s most important to understand about Mejia is just how effective he can be across a variety of roles. That might be because, early on in his career, he had to be.
But it’s also reflective of a mind that needs to be challenged. He is currently pursuing cloud and AI certifications, and the communities he keeps say a lot about where he thinks the field is headed. He’s a founding member of the Sales Comp Think Tank, a private peer group of senior compensation leaders hosted by Forma.ai, where practitioners pressure-test ideas and debate the future of the discipline. He is also a member of the Xactly Customer Advisory Board (CAB), helping shape the direction of one of the industry’s leading incentive compensation platforms.
“I just want to be part of an organization where there’s more to learn,” Mejia says. “I am at my best when I can be challenged to take on complex global problems.”
Continuing Curiosity
To this day, one of Mejia’s proudest accomplishments is coming to the US in the early 2000s, with extremely limited English and an accounting degree, and making a life for himself. He revalidated his credits and completed a business management degree at Kean University. Along the way, he participated in an executive management program at Tsinghua University in Beijing.
The experience in China widened his field of view and helped establish a global perspective that he would spend the next two decades refining. It taught him to see beyond any single market or culture and gave him context for how to think globally, especially as a future leader.
Early on, Mejia had to be scrappy. He functioned in, essentially, three different roles concurrently at a small mom-and-pop shop, where he learned he was great at multitasking. He learned early that while he initially excelled on the books side of the business, he could build rapport and strong relationships with the sales side of organizations.
If there is a unique situation, Mejia has probably navigated it. He came to UiPath pre-IPO. At Wiley, a 200-year-old publishing institution, he had to modernize a sales compensation process that was mostly manual and deeply rooted in the past. At Intralinks, he built a team from scratch. He also had the opportunity to be both the driver and passenger in M&A deals that saw his organization trading hands multiple times.
“Going through such significant M&A, I got a real sense of risk, stability, and long-term design,” Mejia says. “Compensation operations need to hold up to that kind of pressure.”
To those who may consider moving to the US, Mejia stresses patience and humility. He speaks of a friend, a highly regarded legal advisor in their home country, now navigating a fresh start in the US with far less recognition. His advice: set a few milestones, don’t try to do everything at once, and stay consistent, especially when things get tough.
“I’ve been the person who arrives with nothing, who doesn’t speak the language,” Mejia says. “Those experiences build your backbone, and they build character. You ultimately decide how you let those shape you.”
