About Dinesh Mittal
I have spent 26 years in engineering, across the whole SW stack. First half of my career focussed on 3G/4G Cellular protocol stacks, Bluetooth and Wi-Fi SW stacks, writing BSPs and silicon platform bring-up, then moved through system integration, verification, validation and certifications for wireless platforms. 2nd half of my career has been on large scale distributed systems for product and enterprise use-cases, leading Infrastructure & Platform Engineering, DevOps, SRE functions, building Cloud and AI infrastructure platforms. I have built new competencies and practices from 0 to scale; delivering outcomes with engineering excellence and operational excellence.
I have led global organisations of up to 120 directors, architects, engineering managers & 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 & practices 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. We build custom language models trained on a company's own agents run-time traces, and route them through a routing layer that decides which model handles each request.
I write about AI, SW engineering and leadership. Start with the essays, or the shorter notes.
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
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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.
- I turned high-volume manual operations into one-touch developer self-service, eliminating more than 5,000 tickets per month. I also led several AI transformation initiatives, each with measurable gains in effectiveness and efficiency
- Agentic software development: Led an end-to-end agentic SDLC for a highly complex platform project. It covered roadmap and Jira ticket creation taking inputs from multiple sources, synthesizing into existing architecture, creating design records, doing coding, testing and deployment, with human approval gates at key decision points. Engineering effort and cycle time dropped by more than 80%, and the team cleared the entire tech-debt backlog in two months.
- Agentic SRE root-cause analysis: Led an agentic platform that collects logs from multiple sources, correlates and analyzes them, and delivers triage and likely causes within 5 minutes. Mean time to debug fell by 70%, and incident response met its SLAs.
- IT service management on in-house products: Led the technology exploration, prototype and MVP for an internal ITSM platform built on Palo Alto Networks' own XSOAR and XSIAM.
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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.
- Built the team, roadmap and engineering practice from scratch and led the general-purpose and AI cloud platform to public launch and paying enterprise customers within six months
- My scope spanned to build and launched compute(VM, K8S), storage(Block and Object Storage), networking(DNS, Load Balancers), identity and security (IAM, Certificates), Observability and telemetry (CloudWatch, cloudtrail) and Gen-AI model services (Inferencing, Fine-Tuning, Evaluations).
- Apart from customer facing services and platform - built the supporting systems and services like platform data lake, cloud metering and billing, admin dashboards, inventory systems, internal telemetry/monitoring dashboards and alerting for entire operations.
- Led engineering to migrate enterprise customer workloads off hyper-scalers and onboarded enterprise customers to scale to $30M/year revenues.
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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.
Senior Director and Head of Infrastructure Engineering, DevOps and Platform Engineering
Built large-scale, efficient silicon, hardware and software platform engineering workflows, methodologies and practices, and led software systems engineering functions of integration, validation automation, reference applications, tools, infrastructure, labs, observability and debug solutions, and DevOps and CI/CD for multiple Intel groups (Cellular Wireless platforms, IoT platforms, Network and Edge platforms and solutions).
- End-to-end engineering workflow, practices and engine to deliver weekly, fully qualified platform releases, enabling 15+ simultaneous multi-generational platforms and product lines.
- Large-scale CI/CD, test automation frameworks, tools and solutions: test automation rate raised from under 20% to over 80%, more than 100K test executions a day, and auto-triage of thousands of test failures and defects reported each day.
- Development and test lab infrastructure across more than 10 sites and 10K systems, with fully remote operations, 0/1-touch provisioning, telemetry and dashboards.
- Gen-AI and ML assisted co-pilot solutions for software development, validation, debugging, DevOps, and infrastructure engineering and operations.
- Mature processes to support internal engineering teams and scaled infrastructure: a unified services ticket support system for all frameworks, tools, solutions and infrastructure, with live dashboards and SLA compliance, keeping more than 99% uptime.
Senior Engineering Manager
Led Intel's wireless connectivity innovation, cellular Wi-Fi offload and interworking solutions for Intel's wireless and Android-based mobile product portfolio.
- Led software planning, program management, development and integration for Intel's wireless and Android mobile platforms.
- Led early design and technology development, and successful trials and IOTs, for advanced cellular Wi-Fi features (Wi-Fi Calling, LTE-Wi-Fi Aggregation) with key network and operator partners (Verizon, Ericsson, Nokia, AT&T), and Wi-Fi Alliance Passpoint 2.0.
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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.
Senior Engineering Manager
Built and led Wi-Fi system integration, verification, validation and certification teams for CSR's BT-Wi-Fi connectivity chipsets.
- Established software integration and validation strategies, including branching strategy, mainline content and release planning, merge quality criteria, and nightly smoke testing.
- Pioneered and led the design and development of abstraction components and applications to integrate and test Wi-Fi software across functionalities and environments, and to reuse test content and automation across variants and generations of Wi-Fi platforms.
- Established the test automation framework for system integration, validation and certification testing.
- Established scaled, cost-effective labs and infrastructure (including bespoke anechoic rooms and chambers) for Wi-Fi verification, validation and pre-certification.
Technical Architect
Led Windows CE/Mobile BSP, device driver and Bluetooth host software development for CSR's ARM-based development and example mobile platforms.
- Led BSP development and application processor bring-up, and integration of the cellular and BT-Wi-Fi connectivity baseband platforms and software stacks with the application processor.
- Architected, designed and developed the replacement of the Windows Mobile native Bluetooth host stack with CSR's proprietary Bluetooth host stack.
Technical Lead
- Designed and developed the RRC, MAC and L1 control protocol stack layers and features.
- Led the design and development of abstraction software and an SDK to integrate the wireless stack on different RTOS and baseband platforms.
- Wrote, and worked with the standards team on, a number of 3GPP change requests.
- Led GCF and IOTs of 3GPP features with network vendors and operators.
- Supported customers with technical training, onboarding, integration and technical issues.
- Wrote the RRC chapter of the book WCDMA: Requirements and Practical Design (ISBN 9780470861776).
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L&T Infotech Software Engineer
Wireless 3G cellular protocol stack development for Samsung Mobile.
- Designed and developed RRC procedures, especially connection and data bearer control procedures.
- Integrated RRC with other software components and brought up the entire protocol stack for full end-to-end calls and functionality.
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.
Certifications
- Improving Deep Neural Networks: Hyperparameter Tuning, Regularization and Optimization
- Python for Data Science
- What is Data Science?
- Foundations of Everyday Leadership
- Being a Good Mentor
For a full CV, get in touch.