Tejas Kokje

Founder

San Francisco, California, United States20 yrs 10 mos experience

Key Highlights

10/10 rating on PlatoHQ mentoring platform
Led engineering teams to develop cloud infrastructure software
Expertise in cloud-native observability and engineering leadership

Stackforce AI infers this person is a SaaS-focused engineering leader with expertise in cloud infrastructure and observability.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Start-up LeadershipEngineering LeadershipCloud NativeCloud Computing

Other Skills

Venture CapitalOrganizational LeadershipStrategic LeadershipTechnical LeadershipObservabilityGo (Programming Language)TCP/IPData CenterVLANRoutingLinuxEthernetEmbedded SystemsDistributed SystemsSwitches

About

I bring a wealth of experience in leading teams to develop cloud infrastructure software. As a seasoned mentor, I've honed my skills in coaching engineers across various aspects, including engineering leadership, setting stakeholder-driven strategic and tactical goals, and guiding cross-functional teams to deliver high-quality solutions at scale. My commitment to efficient processes is reflected in a 10/10 rating on the PlatoHQ mentoring platform, earned through more than 50 sessions with individual contributors and engineering leaders. Specializing in engineering leadership, product vision, and strategy, my expertise extends to cloud infrastructure and cloud-native observability. I am proficient in Go (Golang), Python, and C programming, with a mastery of Kubernetes & AWS. In summary, my specialties encompass not only technical proficiency but also the strategic leadership required for building successful cloud infrastructure products.

Experience

20 yrs 10 mos

Total Experience

Average Tenure

Current Experience

Caylex

Founding Member

Jun 2025 – Present · 1 yr · San Francisco Bay Area

Context Engineering, Agentic Infra

Start-up LeadershipVenture Capital

Middleware (yc w23)

Head of Engineering & Founding Engineer

Jun 2023 – Jun 2025 · 2 yrs · San Francisco Bay Area · Hybrid

Building and leading engineering organization of 35 engineers (and growing) to develop AI-enabled observability platform.
Driving strategy, vision & execution to build next-generation AI powered observability platform for cloud native workloads.
Player-Coach & Hands-on working with engineers to drive engineering best practices for producing high quality product.

Organizational LeadershipEngineering LeadershipStrategic LeadershipTechnical LeadershipCloud NativeObservability+1

Netflix

Senior Software Engineer

Apr 2019 – Jun 2023 · 4 yrs 2 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

Improving your Netflix viewing experience by optimizing cloud network infrastructure.
All things AWS Security, VPC, Network Insight, DNS, Cloud Infrastructure Abstraction, Kubernetes and more !

Go (Programming Language)Engineering LeadershipStrategic LeadershipCloud Computing

Digitalocean

Team Lead

Jul 2016 – Apr 2019 · 2 yrs 9 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

DigitalOcean IPO'd in March 2021.
I lead team of engineers to design and implement scalable cloud load balancer service for DigitalOcean's cloud computing products using Go programming (Golang), Open vSwitch, KVM, libvirt, Docker, Kubernetes and Ansible.

Go (Programming Language)Organizational LeadershipEngineering LeadershipStrategic LeadershipCloud Computing

A10 networks

Staff Software Engineer

Mar 2013 – Jul 2016 · 3 yrs 4 mos · San Jose, CA

A10 Networks IPO'd in March 2014.
Below are the projects that I accomplished at A10 Networks.
Overlay Tunneling
Worked on delivering overlay tunneling feature to support A10's SDN solution. Developed scalable tunneling infrastructure to handle overlay/underlay ARP/Mac learning, host to VTEP source learning, TCP MSS adjust, IP fragmentation & Jumbo Frame/MTU issues.
Integrated overlay tunneling feature with L4-L7 features (like server load balancing) to enable A10 Thunder appliance use in SDN solutions.
Developed support for VxLAN tunnels to inter-operate with Open vSwitch.
Added support for NVGRE tunnels to inter-operate with Microsoft SCVMM.
Provided RESTful APIs to configure and display tunneling configuration.
Multi-Device Load Balancer
Worked on Multi-Device Load Balancer SCALE-OUT architecture to support elastic scaling of Virtual IP (VIP) & Virtual Port (VPORT) .
Leveraged Apache Zookeeper platform for reliable coordination between Queen and service nodes of Beehive architecture.
More details about solution can be found at https://tinyurl.com/yd7otdv8
Stateful Data Center Firewall
Designed and developed efficient Trie based policy lookup algorithm for Permitting/Denying packets going through Firewall.
Developed support for IPv4/IPv6 address ranges, zones, object-groups.
Developed support for SIP, FTP, DNS & TFTP application level gateways (ALG).
Added support for permitting responses to requests originated by Firewall (health-checks, Pings, HA control traffic etc) by developing framework for creating sessions and installing internal rules
Integrated Firewall with other features like L4/L7 Server Load Balancing & NAT.

Go (Programming Language)Engineering Leadership

Cisco systems inc

Software Engineer

Aug 2006 – Feb 2013 · 6 yrs 6 mos · San Jose, CA

Designed and developed Virtual LAN (802.1Q), Private Virtual LAN (PVLAN) & Switched Virtual Interface (SVI) features for Cisco Nexus 7000 series switches running Linux based NX-OS.
Leveraged high availability & virtual device context (VDC) infrastructure of Nexus 7000 to implement these features.
Extended these features to support technologies like Ethernet Virtual Circuit(EVC), Layer 2 VPN, FabricPath (Layer 2 Multipathing), Virtual Port Channels (Multi Chasis Ether-Channels)
Familiarity with Layer 2 protocols like 802.1d (Spanning Tree Protocol), VLAN Trunking Protocol, Cisco Discovery Protocol
Enhanced Fabric Shortest Path First (FSPF) protocol for supporting hitless software upgrades on MDS 9500 fibre channel storage switch.
Mentored university new hires on networking technologies and production quality systems software development.
Filed multiple patents on Fibre Channel Routing.

Blue coat systems inc

Software Engineer

Jun 2005 – Jul 2006 · 1 yr 1 mo · Sunnyvale, CA

Developed new features in HTTP, ICAP and FTP kernel modules in C++ for proxy appliances running Blue Coat's SGOS embedded operating system.
Developed logging features in ICAP and FTP protocols.
Integrated ICAP protocol with FTP for content filtering and virus scanning.
Responsible for re-writing significant parts of the code to remove race conditions and implementing features like data trickling in ICAP protocol.