About

Neeraj Poddar is a highly experienced engineering leader with a proven track record of delivering outcomes in early-stage organizations and emerging markets. He has a passion for implementing innovative solutions while motivating teams towards collective success and enjoys mentoring and building high-performing collaborative teams. Neeraj has expertise in interfacing with customers to understand their needs and define product requirements in nascent markets. Neeraj is an open-source enthusiast and maintainer of several open-source projects. He is currently a member of the Technical Oversight Committee (TOC) and former Steering Committee member in the Istio project. Neeraj enjoys creating technical assets that surface business value and can be consumed by broader audiences. He is a frequent speaker at meetups, podcasts, webinars, and conferences. Neeraj is the author of the Manning Liveproject 'Secure application deployment with Istio on Kubernetes'. He has programming skills in Go, C, C++, Node.js, Python, and JavaScript. Neeraj is well-versed in technologies such as Microservices, Service Mesh, Kubernetes, Docker, AWS, gRPC, Networking and TCP/IP stack, Security Protocols, Compiler - LLVM, and Linux Kernel. Currently, Neeraj is the Head of Engineering at solo.io, where he leads the engineering team. He has also worked as an Architect and Principal Software Engineer at f5. Neeraj co-founded Aspen Mesh to deliver a service mesh platform built on Open Source Istio to simplify Microservices adoption for enterprises. He architected and implemented the first version of Aspen Mesh product and SaaS platform. Neeraj holds an MS in Electrical & Computer Engineering from the University of Florida and a BE in Electrical & Electronics Engineering from Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani. With 12.53 years of relevant experience, Neeraj specializes in Software Architecture, Open Source strategy, Distributed Systems, Cloud Native Stack, Networking, and Security.