Kumar Ranjan — Director of Engineering
I lead and collaborate with multi-site quality engineering teams delivering enterprise storage ASICs, controllers and platforms from early architecture through production releases and customer-scale deployments. I focus on enterprise readiness end to end: reliability, performance, security, and truly zero-downtime upgrades across firmware, Linux I/O paths, and cloud-connected operations (including distributed systems). I work closely with Product, Architecture, and customer-facing teams to turn the roadmap into predictable releases with clear, measurable quality. Core strengths : • Multi-site org leadership (FTE + contractors), hiring, vendor management. • Enterprise storage readiness and zero-downtime release engineering. • NVMe / NVMe-oF (RoCEv2, TCP), JBOF and all-flash array strategy. • Performance engineering: SPDK, io_uring, datapath optimization, DPU offload. • Security for storage fabrics: DH-HMAC-CHAP, TLS, IPsec • Customer-facing leadership: escalations, design reviews, exec communication. • Debugging and triage using protocol analyzers and traces Technical depth: NVMe/PCIe, NVMe-oF, Ethernet/FC/iSCSI/NFS, Linux storage stack (DM-MP and related subsystems), RAID/data protection, and protocol-level debugging with Wireshark, LeCroy, and VIAVI.
Stackforce AI infers this person is a leader in enterprise storage solutions with a focus on reliability and performance.
Location: Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Experience: 19 yrs 5 mos
Skills
- Nvme
- Enterprise Storage Readiness
Career Highlights
- Led multi-site quality engineering teams for enterprise storage.
- Expert in zero-downtime release engineering.
- 30+ granted patents in storage solutions.
Work Experience
Western Digital
Director @ Data Center Systems BU (3 yrs 11 mos)
Senior Manager [NVMe and NVMe Platforms] (3 yrs 3 mos)
Technologist (11 mos)
SanDisk, a Western Digital Brand
Principal Engineer (1 yr 5 mos)
Staff Engineer (8 mos)
NetApp Bangalore
Member Technical Staff (QA for SAN/NFS storage and virtualization) (4 yrs 8 mos)
LSI Corporation
QA Engineer (QA for MegaRAID DAS storage) (4 yrs 7 mos)
Education
Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) at PES Institute of Technology, Bangalore
Class 10-12 at Delhi Public School - Bokaro Steel City -Jharkhand