ARUNACHALAM PALANIAPPAN
Bengaluru
Summary
Principal Engineering Manager and AI Product Architect with 22+ years of experience building enterprise-scale platforms across Industrial AI, Semiconductor, Finance, and Cloud-native ecosystems.
Hands-on leader in designing and deploying AI-powered products using frontier models including Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), and GPT-based systems. Proven experience building RAG platforms, agentic AI systems, and secure on-prem AI assistants in air-gapped environments.
Expert in architecting multi-agent orchestration systems using CrewAI, LangGraph, structured toolchains, and intelligent workflow engines. Strong capability in translating AI PoCs into production-grade platforms with governance, RBAC, observability, and cost-aware deployment models.
Overview
23
23
years of professional experience
Work History
Principal Engineering Manager | Product & AI Architect
ASM Technologies
01.2019 - Current
- Owned end-to-end delivery of multiple AI-driven platforms across on-prem, edge, and cloud environments.
- Acted as Solution Architect and presales design authority for enterprise AI and platform modernization initiatives.
- Led customer discovery workshops and translated requirements into HLDs, LLDs, and integration architectures.
- Designed and executed multiple Proof of Concepts (PoCs) to validate AI platforms, integration patterns, and cloud-native architectures.
- Demonstrated PoC outcomes to senior customer stakeholders and converted PoCs into full-scale production deployments.
- Defined API-first, event-driven, and hybrid integration models.
- Architected secure AI Assist platforms for air-gapped semiconductor environments.
- Presented solution proposals, architecture options, delivery plans, and effort estimates to senior leadership.
- Performed feasibility and cost analysis to guide platform and technology decisions.
- Built and scaled engineering teams from zero to 45+ across engineering, QA, DevOps, MLOps, and AI.
- Ramped multiple engineering teams from zero.
- Defined end-to-end solution architectures for high-scale, security-sensitive platforms.
- Established engineering standards and CI/CD pipelines, improving delivery predictability by 30%+.
- Enabled full team productivity within 60-90 days.
- Defined end-to-end solution architectures for security-sensitive, large-scale enterprise platforms.
- Led PoCs and architecture validations prior to full-scale delivery.
- Established engineering standards and CI/CD pipelines to improve delivery predictability.
- Designed and built an enterprise-grade AI Assistant for semiconductor manufacturing environments using Claude, Gemini, and GPT-based systems.
- Architected secure air-gapped RAG platform with hybrid retrieval (vector + structured search).
- Implemented multi-agent workflows using CrewAI and LangGraph for task planning, reasoning, and tool invocation.
- Designed deterministic latency architecture for real-time factory usage.
- Integrated structured tools (log analysis, configuration validation, process simulation).
- Used Drain3 for log template mining and automated anomaly clustering.
- Built evaluation framework for LLM retrieval accuracy, hallucination monitoring, and model benchmarking.
- Implemented enterprise RBAC and controlled data access for AI systems deployed in high-security manufacturing environments.
- Led PoC-to-production AI lifecycle including infra setup, MLOps pipelines, CI/CD for AI systems.
Technical Manager
Dell EMC
01.2017 - 01.2019
- Led cloud-first security and identity platforms.
- Improved scalability, governance, and compliance across distributed systems.
Senior Technical Manager
Cognizant
01.2016 - 01.2017
- Delivered cloud-native modernization programs.
- Improved performance, maintainability, and deployment velocity.
Technical Manager
Goldman Sachs
01.2010 - 01.2016
- Delivered automation platforms reducing operational and regulatory risk.
- Built BCP and resilience automation systems improving recovery timelines by 40%+.
- Delivered mission-critical platforms under strict compliance and audit requirements.
- Designed and delivered mission-critical platforms under strict regulatory and compliance requirements.
- Led architecture definition and feasibility analysis for automation and resilience systems.
- Partnered with senior stakeholders to define solution scope, risk posture, and delivery roadmaps.
Technical Lead
EF Education First
01.2008 - 01.2010
- Led a 36-member global engineering team delivering CRM platforms.
- Improved platform reliability and multi-region release execution.
Senior Software Engineer
Thomson Reuters
01.2003 - 01.2008
- Contributed to financial analytics and modeling platforms.
- Strengthened core architecture and system reliability.
Education
Master of Computer Applications -
Bharathidasan University
Bachelor of Science - Computer Science
SS Annamalai College
Skills
- Customer discovery & requirement workshops
- Application & enterprise architecture design
- High-Level Design (HLD)
- Low-Level Design (LLD)
- Integration architecture
- Enterprise integration
- Proof of Concept (PoC) design
- Rapid prototyping
- PoC-to-production transition planning
- Cloud-native modernization
- Platform recommendation
- Cost modeling
- Effort estimation
- Delivery planning
- RFP/RFI technical response support
- Application & Enterprise Architecture
- Discovery Workshops & Requirement Analysis
- Integration Architecture
- Solution Proposals & Estimation
- Cloud Platforms
- Cloud-Native Architecture
- Containers & Serverless Concepts
- Infrastructure as Code
- CI/CD and GitOps Concepts
- REST / gRPC APIs
- Event Streaming & Messaging
- Observability & Reliability Engineering
- Security Architecture
- AI Assist Platforms
- Agentic AI & Intelligent Automation
- Predictive Intelligence & Edge AI
- End-to-end ownership
- Release governance
- Predictive Maintenance
- Observability
- Roadmap execution
- On-prem AI Assist
- Anomaly Detection
- Kubernetes
- RBAC
- Requirement analysis
- LLM orchestration
- Cloud-native & hybrid systems
- Docker
- Reliability Engineering
- Solution definition
- Agentic AI
- Microservices
- CI/CD
- Kafka
Personal Information
Title: PRINCIPAL ENGINEERING MANAGER | APPLICATION SOLUTION ARCHITECT AI, CLOUD & INTEGRATION PLATFORMS
Core Leadership And Technical Expertise
- Application & Enterprise Architecture
- Discovery Workshops & Requirement Analysis
- HLD / LLD Design, Integration Architecture (API, Event-driven, Batch)
- Proof of Concepts (PoCs), Solution Proposals & Estimation, RFP / RFI Responses
- C-level Stakeholder Engagement
- Cloud Platforms: AWS | Azure | Hybrid | On-Prem, Cloud-Native Architecture (Microservices, Kubernetes), Containers & Serverless Concepts, Infrastructure as Code (Terraform - working knowledge), CI/CD and GitOps Concepts
- REST / gRPC APIs, Event Streaming & Messaging, Observability & Reliability Engineering
- Security Architecture (RBAC, air-gapped environments), AI Assist Platforms (RAG, LLM orchestration), Agentic AI & Intelligent Automation, Predictive Intelligence & Edge AI
AI Product Engineering & Frontier Model Systems
- Built enterprise AI Assist platforms using Claude (Anthropic), Gemini (Google), and GPT-based systems.
- Designed multi-model fallback architecture (Claude + Gemini + GPT) for reliability and cost optimization.
- Implemented Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) pipelines with hybrid search (vector + keyword).
- Designed secure on-prem AI systems for air-gapped industrial environments.
- Built agentic AI systems using: CrewAI for multi-agent collaboration, LangGraph for stateful agent orchestration
- Tool-augmented reasoning workflows
- Implemented structured toolchains (search tools, DB tools, API tools, simulation tools).
- Used Drain3 for log template mining and anomaly pattern extraction.
- Designed evaluation pipelines for LLM performance, hallucination detection, and retrieval accuracy.
- Implemented memory management and session context engineering strategies.
- Developed deterministic latency AI architecture for factory environments.
- Implemented strict RBAC and data isolation for enterprise AI deployments.
- Experience with vector databases (Chroma, FAISS, Postgres/pgvector).
- Implemented real-time log analysis and anomaly detection using hybrid ML + LLM approaches.
Executive Value Proposition
- Lead customer discovery workshops to capture functional, non-functional, security, and scalability requirements.
- Own solution architecture across Logical, Process, Development, Physical, and Deployment views.
- Design and deliver Proof of Concepts (PoCs) to validate architecture, integration patterns, and cloud-native approaches.
- Convert PoCs into scalable, secure, production-ready platforms.
- Drive presales success through solution proposals, estimates, and architecture justification.
- Present solution options, trade-offs, and roadmaps to senior leadership and CXOs.
- Bridge business intent with technical execution to ensure feasibility, cost control, and time-to-value.
Business Impact And Value Created
- Accelerated AI product adoption by converting PoCs to production, shortening delivery cycles by 6-12 months per product.
- Reduced unplanned downtime by 30-40% using predictive intelligence, avoiding multi-million-dollar annual losses.
- Enabled secure on-prem AI adoption in air-gapped environments, unlocking new enterprise opportunities.
- Built and scaled teams from zero to 45+ engineers, saving $2-4M annually in vendor and consulting costs.
- Achieved ~50% MTTR reduction through observability and reliability engineering.
- Estimated net annualized value delivered $5-10M+.
Languages
Tamil, English
First Language
Timeline
Principal Engineering Manager | Product & AI Architect
ASM Technologies
01.2019 - Current
Technical Manager
Dell EMC
01.2017 - 01.2019
Senior Technical Manager
Cognizant
01.2016 - 01.2017
Technical Manager
Goldman Sachs
01.2010 - 01.2016
Technical Lead
EF Education First
01.2008 - 01.2010
Senior Software Engineer
Thomson Reuters
01.2003 - 01.2008
Master of Computer Applications -
Bharathidasan University
Bachelor of Science - Computer Science
SS Annamalai College