About
I have spent 26 years in engineering, from 3G protocol stacks and Wi-Fi firmware to cloud platforms and AI infrastructure, at CSR/Qualcomm, Intel, OLA Krutrim and Palo Alto Networks.
I have led organisations of 120+ people across India, Europe, the US and East Asia, took an AI cloud from zero to public launch, and ran the platforms behind more than $6B a year in revenue. Today I am a co-founder of NeoSmith AI, where we build codebase-specific small language models and a routing layer that sends each request to the cheapest model able to answer it.
I write here about AI infrastructure, platform engineering and running engineering teams: what worked, what it cost, and what I would do differently.
Writing
Will your AI models take Code of Conduct training and an audit?
Microsoft AI's draft Code of Conduct says clearly what its models should do. It says very little about how anyone will know they are doing it. Four gaps I raised in my feedback.
Services
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Platform engineering advisory
A senior sounding board for leaders building or fixing an internal developer or infrastructure platform.
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AI adoption review for engineering teams
A short, fixed-scope review of how your engineering organisation uses AI tools today, what it costs, and where it pays off.
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Engineering leadership advisory
Ongoing, confidential advice for engineering leaders stepping into a larger role or a harder problem.
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Board of Directors
A seat on your board, or its technology committee, from someone who has run engineering, cloud and AI at scale.
Experience
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NeoSmith AI Co-founder, Strategy, Product and Engineering
Neosmith AI provides custom small language models for a specific domain and use-case behind a routing layer that sends each request to the cheapest model able to answer user query. 1st such domain we specialized is SW coding. We built MVP in just two months and enterprise pilots show customer AI coding spend down by more than 50% against frontier-model usage
- Small language models
- Inference routing
- AI economics
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Palo Alto Networks Senior Director, Head of Infrastructure Platform Engineering
Led the global platform engineering organization that delivered a fully automated, governed internal developer platform for IT and software engineering. The platform covered cloud development, core networking (firewall, DNS), compute (VM, Kubernetes), identity and security (certificate management), observability, and CI/CD and SRE services.
- Platform engineering
- Agentic AI
- SRE
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OLA Krutrim Senior Director of Engineering
Led Krutrim's Cloud Platform Engineering group - built both General Purpose and AI cloud services platform for public and enterprise customers.
- AI cloud
- Cloud platform
- 0 to 1
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Intel Senior Director and Head of Infrastructure Engineering, DevOps and Platform Engineering
10 years 8 months across two roles: wireless connectivity innovation for Intel's mobile products, then infrastructure, DevOps and platform engineering for the Cellular Wireless, IoT, and Network and Edge groups, serving customers from Apple to hundreds of OEM, ODM and SI partners.
- DevOps
- Infrastructure
- Validation at scale
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CSR (acquired by Qualcomm) Senior Engineering Manager, Technical Architect and Technical Lead
12 years 3 months, from 3G protocol stacks to building and leading Wi-Fi system integration, verification, validation and certification for CSR's BT-Wi-Fi connectivity chipsets.
- Wireless
- Embedded
- Protocol stacks
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L&T Infotech Software Engineer
Wireless 3G cellular protocol stack development for Samsung Mobile.
- 3G
NeoSmith AI · Palo Alto Networks · OLA Krutrim · Intel · CSR (acquired by Qualcomm) · L&T Infotech