Praveen Patnala

CEO

Santa Clara, California, United States24 yrs 3 mos experience

Most Likely To SwitchHighly Stable

Key Highlights

Led rapid product launch at Cisco post-acquisition.
Co-founded innovative cloud security startup Valtix.
Holds 22 patents in technology and engineering.

Stackforce AI infers this person is a Cloud Security expert with extensive experience in SaaS and data engineering.

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Skills

Core Skills

Cloud ComputingSecurityData EngineeringInfrastructureAnalytics

Other Skills

Engineering ExecutionTeam LeadershipCloud SecurityNetwork SecurityProduct DevelopmentNetworkingWeb CrawlingData InfrastructureWeb AnalyticsCrawlingHadoopCassandraSolrCloudOptimizationStorage Solutions

About

I am a Senior Director of Engineering at Cisco. Cisco acquired my startup Valtix, where I was the Co-Founder and VP Engineering, a cloud security company. Prior to that, I was an engineer in Google Cloud Platform. Early in my career, I have worked at Andiamo (largest Cisco spin-in), before joining as an early employee at BloomReach and then LaserLike. Worked on infrastructure, security, networking, storage systems, web infrastructure, analytics, crawling. Patents - 22 in total - 9 approved, 13 pending. Enjoy engineering execution, mentoring people and leading engineering teams. Deep-down, a hands-on individual contributor. Academic - M.S Computer Science, UNC Chapel Hill. B.Tech Computer Science & Engineering, IIT Madras. Ranked 42nd in India (top 0.05% - 100,000 candidates), All India IIT-JEE '94. President’s Gold Medal (top 0.1% - 22,000 candidates), National Physics Olympiad ’94. Merit Award (best 20 incoming students), IIT Madras ‘94. Ranked 1st (among 5000 students), 12th Board exams ’94 in the city of Berhampur, Odisha.

Experience

24 yrs 3 mos

Total Experience

2 yrs 5 mos

Average Tenure

3 yrs 2 mos

Current Experience

Pef community

Member

Aug 2024 – Present · 1 yr 10 mos

Cisco

Senior Director of Engineering

Apr 2023 – Present · 3 yrs 2 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

Cisco acquired Valtix and the product is now offered as Cisco Multicloud Defense. We launched it within a record 2 months post acquisition at Cisco Live 2023.
Leading the engineering team for Cisco Multicloud Defense.

Engineering ExecutionTeam LeadershipCloud SecurityCloud ComputingSecurity

Regie.ai

Advisor

Jun 2021 – Present · 5 yrs · San Francisco Bay Area

regie.ai helps Sales and Marketing teams create better-performing content efficiently using NLP and AI technologies.

Valtix

Co-Founder, VP Engineering

Feb 2018 – Mar 2023 · 5 yrs 1 mo · San Francisco Bay Area

Valtix is the industry’s first, cloud-native network security platform for enterprises. Comprised of the Valtix Cloud Controller and Valtix Cloud Firewall, the solution revolutionizes cloud network security with innovations that make visibility and security policy enforcement that follows apps as they scale or move across accounts, regions and clouds.

Cloud SecurityNetwork SecurityProduct DevelopmentSecurityCloud Computing

Google

Software Engineer

Oct 2017 – Feb 2018 · 4 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

Working on Google Cloud Platform for Networking and Security.

NetworkingSecurityCloud Computing

Laserlike inc

Engineering

Apr 2016 – Jan 2017 · 9 mos · San Francisco Bay Area

LaserLike was acquired by Apple in early 2019.
I worked on various strategic projects including web crawling, data ingestion, data infrastructure powering LaserLike backend.

Web CrawlingData InfrastructureData EngineeringInfrastructure

Bloomreach

Director of Engineering

Mar 2010 – Jul 2015 · 5 yrs 4 mos

BloomReach (200-person startup across Mountain View, Bangalore, NY, London)
Led a 20-member engineering team building the Organic Search platform—BloomReach’s primary revenue driver.
Key contributions included:
Web Analytics: Built a Hadoop-based attribution system to measure SEO uplift and generate billing data.
Data Infrastructure (BloomStore): Designed a Cassandra + SolrCloud platform to manage and enrich customer web content powering all products.
Crawling (Sitefetch): Developed large-scale crawlers for top-tier retail sites.
Canonicalization: Built URL de-duplication systems using content and structural signals.
Ops & Infra: Managed cloud vendor relationships (e.g., AWS), customer deployment architecture, and security best practices.

Web AnalyticsData InfrastructureCrawlingData EngineeringAnalytics