About
About
I have spent 26 years in engineering, across the whole stack. I started on 3G/4G protocol stacks, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi firmware and silicon platform bring-up, then moved through labs, validation and certification, and on to cloud platforms, DevOps and SRE, distributed systems and AI infrastructure.
I have led global organisations of up to 120 directors, architects and programme managers across India, Europe, the US and East Asia, plus 100+ contractors. That meant owning headcount, budget, suppliers and partners, and delivery commitments to customers from Apple to hundreds of OEM and ODM partners. What I care about most is a leadership bench, operating model and engineering culture that still hold after I hand over.
In AI, I took OLA Krutrim's cloud from zero to public launch and paying enterprise customers, and at Palo Alto Networks I led an agentic AI platform that runs DevOps and SRE work unattended in production. I am now a co-founder of NeoSmith AI in Bengaluru. We build small language models trained on a company's own codebase, and a routing layer that decides which model handles each request.
I write here about AI infrastructure, platform engineering and engineering leadership. Start with the essays, or the shorter notes.
Selected outcomes
- 80%+
- Lower enterprise AI coding spend than frontier-model usage, with codebase-specific small models behind a routing layer (NeoSmith AI).
- 0 → launch
- OLA Krutrim Cloud built from scratch to public availability in six months, with enterprise customers at $30M a year.
- 80% / 80%
- Fewer P1/P2 incidents and faster detection at Palo Alto Networks, through an agentic AI platform for DevOps and SRE, at over 99.5% uptime.
- <20% → >80%
- Validation automation at Intel, running over 100,000 tests a day with automated triage of thousands of daily failures.
- 3 → 10+
- Platform releases a year at Intel across 15+ concurrent product lines, weekly and fully qualified.
- 2,000+
- Engineers at Intel whose workflows and engineering methods were modernised across several business groups.
- $2M+
- Saved each year at CSR/Qualcomm by building in-house self-certification labs and chambers.
Experience
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Co-founder, Strategy, Product and Engineering, NeoSmith AI
Codebase-specific small language models behind a routing layer that sends each request to the cheapest model able to answer it. MVP in two months; enterprise pilots show AI coding spend down by more than 80% against frontier-model usage.
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Senior Director, Head of Infrastructure Platform Engineering, Palo Alto Networks
Led the platform engineering group behind one-touch networking, compute and identity services for internal engineering. An agentic AI platform for DevOps and SRE work cut P1/P2 incidents and mean time to detect by 80% each, at more than 99.5% uptime.
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Head of Engineering, Cloud Platform, OLA Krutrim
Built the team and engineering practice from scratch and took a general-purpose and AI cloud from zero to public launch in six months: compute, storage, networking, security and Gen-AI model services. Moved OLA group workloads off hyperscalers and grew enterprise revenue to $30M a year.
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Senior Director / Director of Engineering, Intel
Led DevOps and infrastructure engineering for the AI, Wireless, IoT, Network and Edge businesses, serving Apple and hundreds of OEM and ODM partners on platforms behind more than $6B a year in revenue. The same headcount delivered 4x the volume at 4x the velocity, and validation automation rose from under 20% to over 80%.
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Senior Engineering Manager, Principal Engineer and Architect, CSR (acquired by Qualcomm)
Built and led Wi-Fi systems, integration, validation and certification; more than 100 million units of wireless software shipped. In-house certification labs and chambers saved more than $2M a year. Earlier, architected 2G/3G/4G protocol stacks and Bluetooth host software.
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Software Engineer, contracted to Samsung Mobile, L&T Infotech
Built the RRC layer of a 3G protocol stack.
Publications and education
- Contributor, WCDMA: Requirements and Practical Design (Wiley, ISBN 9780470861776), RRC chapter. Several 3GPP change requests accepted into the specification.
- B.E. (Electronics and Communication) with Honours, Punjab Engineering College, Chandigarh, 1999.
For a full CV, get in touch.
How I work
- Cost is a design input
- Unit economics belong in the architecture review, not in the post-launch surprise. I ask what a request costs before asking how fast it is.
- From silicon to service
- Having worked from embedded systems to cloud platforms, I look for the layer where a problem is cheapest to fix, which is often not the layer where it shows up.
- Platforms are products
- Internal platforms succeed when engineers choose them. That means clear interfaces, honest documentation, and measuring adoption instead of mandating it.
- Small teams, clear ownership
- Most delivery problems are ownership problems. I prefer fewer, smaller teams with explicit boundaries over large groups with shared responsibility.