About

Kaustubh Patkar is a highly accomplished and results-oriented leader with a strong business acumen, specializing in engineering management, project management, and technical leadership. He has extensive experience in developing high-performance and high-reliability enterprise embedded systems, including broad enterprise storage experience ranging from system architecture, modeling and analysis to requirements gathering, design, and implementation. Kaustubh has a proven ability to navigate groups through organizational change and technical crises, and is an adept team-builder utilizing skill/strength planning and coaching. He possesses strong communication and negotiation skills with internal and external customers, and is adept at bringing diverse personalities, backgrounds, and technical capabilities together to deliver solutions on schedule. Kaustubh has managed projects from conception through revenue launch and first customer ship stages, and has created and implemented product development schedules and qualification criteria. He is skilled in resource planning and leads global cross-functional teams to deliver complex algorithms and features. He has made key technical choices to drive and enhance company growth and profitability and has experience in design for manufacturability on products with fast product production ramps. Currently, Kaustubh is the Director of Firmware Engineering at Western Digital, where he has held several leadership positions, including Senior Manager and Senior Manager- Strategic Firmware. He has a Certificate in Management for Technical Professionals from the University of California, Irvine - The Paul Merage School of Business, an MS in Computer Systems & Software from the University of California, Irvine, and a BE in Electronics and Communication Engineering from the National Institute of Technology Karnataka. Kaustubh's technical expertise includes storage interfaces such as SATA, SAS, SCSI, storage devices such as HDD, SSD, RAID technologies (RAID 0,1,2,3,4,5,6), performance algorithms (RAID, Single Disk), reliability, and C/C++, multi-threaded programming, and real-time systems. Kaustubh's goal is to drive business growth where his strong technical background and business acumen can be leveraged.