Ishan Mehta
Bangalore
Summary
Software engineering leader with expertise in cloud infrastructure and platform automation. Proven track record in AIOps initiatives, delivering highly reliable and scalable services. Strong business and financial acumen enhances operational excellence and strategic decision-making.
Overview
15
15
years of professional experience
Work History
Director, Software Engineering
Cisco Systems
Bangalore
11.2024 - Current
- Own end-to-end delivery of Cisco IT’s PaaS stack, comprising Kubernetes container platforms, API gateways, managed FTP integrations, Kafka platform, and Engineering IT developer platform, ensuring high scalability, availability, and compliance.
- Managed an $18M annual budget across the global PaaS team, spearheading insourcing initiatives that shifted 30% of workloads in-house, achieving $400K in savings while maintaining four nines availability and accelerating delivery velocity.
- Build a Kubernetes platform for hosting AI/ML workloads powered by Cisco switches, UCS, and Nvidia GPUs.
- Led AI agent development for multi-tenant container platforms, reducing L1 service case volume by approximately 50% through autonomous remediation, and steering the roadmap towards Agentic AI capabilities.
- Drive the AIOps initiative to simplify operations by centralizing alerting platforms, building event correlation, self-healing, anomaly detection, and root cause analysis with a multi-tenant K8 platform.
- Developed a unified PaaS Console as an Internal Developer Platform (IDP) that delivers self-service Day 1, Day 2, and Day 3 (upgrades/retirement) automation across legacy (FTP/EngIT) and modern (Kubernetes, Kafka, API gateways) platforms, creating a single pane of glass UX for all Cisco IT PaaS clients.
- Lead the security initiative for the PaaS platform in collaboration with the Network, Compute, and IT security teams, driving IDP migration for platforms and migrating the control plan of critical PaaS services with macro and micro security in focus.
- Drive the rationalization of redundant services by migrating to modernized, self-serviced, fully automated day 1, 2, and 3 platforms.
- Built and scaled engineering talent through lateral hires, university recruiting, and vendor augmentation, growing the team from 25 to 45 while aligning skills to AIOps, Agentic AI, and Platform Engineering.
- Share the AI and infrastructure story at the leadership program at Cisco Live Melbourne 2024.
- Serving as site leader for 450+ India organization, orchestrating hackathons and AI offsites that fostered cross-team collaboration on critical issues, enhancing innovation and employee experience for Infrastructure and IT groups.
- Achieved and sustained 99.99% availability across all PaaS platforms through proactive SRE practices, redundancy engineering, and chaos testing, minimizing downtime for critical enterprise workloads.
Sr. Manager, Software Engineering
Cisco Systems
Bangalore
04.2022 - 10.2024
- Lead the Infrastructure Platform and Automation organization, responsible for the cloud-native transformation effort of Kubernetes infrastructure by managing and enhancing the Container platform.
- Deliver a consistent user experience, and a scalable framework for provisioning and managing infrastructure and platform services on the private cloud.
- Managed the development of software automation for mission-critical platform services, supporting thousands of VMs and hundreds of thousands of Kubernetes containers.
- Maintained robust Service Level Agreements (SLAs), Service Level Objectives (SLOs), and Service Level Indicators (SLIs) frameworks to enhance operational efficiency, meet client expectations, and drive continuous improvement for cross-functional teams.
- Provide 24/7 operational support for Kubernetes services hosting $55B in business revenue applications across various domains.
- Mentored senior engineers and managers to enhance professional growth and foster a collaborative culture.
- Led an organization of 30 engineers through strategic mentorship and goal alignment, achieving exceptional results in a dynamic environment.
- Ensured high quality software delivery through effective code coverage and security integration.
- Led the development and rollout of a new service offering of a dedicated Kubernetes stack, utilizing Google Anthos or Red Hat OpenShift as our managed platform, resulting in a significant surge of half a million dollars in service utilization each year.
- Recruiting and developing talent with a defined career path and growth
- Drive university hiring for the entire organization.
Manager Technical Systems Engineering
Cisco Systems
Bangalore
08.2019 - 03.2022
- Headed the team responsible for Global Data Center Network Infrastructure, overseeing Network Engineers and Architects focused on Private Cloud initiatives.
- Successfully drive Software-defined everything and adopt DevOps framework to drive productivity and seamless client experience.
- Lead design & implementation of Application Centric Infrastructure [Cisco ACI] deployment across Primary Data Centers.
- Talent development with Professional & University Hire, Coaching & Mentoring to cater to run & change the business needs.
- Managing Data Center Network Service budget considering Run the business, Workforce Strategy, Cost Optimization & Vendor Management.
- Transforming Data Center Operation from reactive to Proactive Service Assurance.
- Defining key SLI / SLO / SLA metrics for service availability.
- Conducted quarterly business reviews with executives, ensuring service availability at 99.99% to uphold and exceed performance standards.
- Responsible for supporting 24
- 7 Network Operations.
- Successfully achieved ISO 9001 certification with external auditors.
- Technology & solution sharing with Customers through Executive Briefing and Cisco Live.
- Foster cross-functional collaboration across infrastructure organization, providing unified application development experience.
Member of Technical Staff / Sr. Network Engineer
Cisco Systems
Bangalore
07.2012 - 07.2019
- Technical Lead for Cisco IT's Global Data Center network team.
- Product owner to drive automation with software-defined everything with Cisco ACI and Load balancer Migration.
- Global Network Operations, Troubleshoot, and Optimize Cisco's Global Data Center network & Development Data Center infrastructure; utilizing distributed, redundant and fault tolerance technologies to maximize production uptime.
- Led the Planning, Designing, Testing, Implementation and Operationalizing of new DC technology.
- New Data Center built in partnership with cross-domain teams.
- Standardize & Document ACI Implementation and Migration.
- Build the workload migration strategy with near-zero downtime for applications.
- Led the migration project from ACE & GSS to Citrix Netscaler Local and Global load balancer.
- Build the detailed runbook for Load balancer deployment, migration, automation, and troubleshooting.
- Responsible for seamless software & hardware upgrades on production devices such as ACI Fabric, nexus switches [7k, 5k, 3k, 2k, 1k], Citrix Netscaler VPX, ASA Firewall & Firepower.
- The primary point of contact for critical issues & escalation support for data center network services to drive high-impacting issues to resolution with long-term solutions.
- Cisco Live Presentation on ACI [SDN] deployment within Cisco IT
- Published white paper with ACI Migration [ACI Migration]
- Partner with sales & Engineering to provide Cisco IT's Data Centre best practices on Design, Implementation and Operations to Customers.
Consultant / Network Engineer
Imatrix Corp
NJ
03.2011 - 06.2012
- Load balancer Migration CSM to ACE, ASA Firewall & Data Center Implementation & Operations.
Education
Masters - Telecommunication Networks
NYU Tandon School of Engineering
05.2010
Bachelor of Engineering - Electronics and Telecommunication
Mumbai University
Mumbai, India08.2008
Skills
- Team development
- Cloud infrastructure
- Platform automation
- Total cost of ownership models
- Customer engagement
- Budget management
- Data center resiliency
- Agile methodology
- Enterprise software
- Budget management
- Enterprise architecture
- Artificial intelligence operations
- Platform engineering
- Vendor management
Timeline
Director, Software Engineering
Cisco Systems
11.2024 - Current
Sr. Manager, Software Engineering
Cisco Systems
04.2022 - 10.2024
Manager Technical Systems Engineering
Cisco Systems
08.2019 - 03.2022
Member of Technical Staff / Sr. Network Engineer
Cisco Systems
07.2012 - 07.2019
Consultant / Network Engineer
Imatrix Corp
03.2011 - 06.2012
Masters - Telecommunication Networks
NYU Tandon School of Engineering
Bachelor of Engineering - Electronics and Telecommunication
Mumbai University