Ritesh Agrawal

Director of Engineering

Bengaluru, Karnataka, India9 yrs 10 mos experience
Most Likely To SwitchAI Enabled

Key Highlights

  • Led transition to microservices architecture.
  • Drove agentic AI initiative in under 3 months.
  • Mentored engineers from intern to senior roles.
Stackforce AI infers this person is a Cybersecurity expert with a strong focus on AI and distributed systems.

Contact

Skills

Core Skills

Engineering ManagementDistributed SystemsSoftware Engineering PracticesSecurityRelational DatabasesRest Apis

Other Skills

Hands-on Technical LeadershipTechnical LeadershipAgentic AI DevelopmentGo (Programming Language)ClickHouseKubernetesLeadershipnatsCybersecurityAI for CybersecurityLarge Language Models (LLM)MicroservicesTechnology RoadmappingPlatform EngineeringMentoring

About

I've spent the last 10 years building and scaling backend platforms in cybersecurity — from writing the first lines of code to leading teams that own products serving 90%+ of the customer base. At Cyware, I lead engineering for the Orchestrate product — the automation and operationalization layer at the heart of the company's SOAR platform. Over the years, I've taken this from a monolithic system to a multi-tenant, microservices-based architecture that runs at 1/9th of the original infrastructure cost. More recently, I drove the company's first agentic AI initiative from concept to first version in under 3 months. Building AI-powered automation in a security context has sharpened my focus on AI safety and adversarial resilience. I actively practice AI red teaming — identifying abuse vectors, prompt manipulation techniques, and model misuse patterns that directly inform how we design guardrails into our agentic systems. On the threat hunting side, I work with Elastic-based investigation workflows across distributed, cloud-native environments — the same operational context our SOAR platform is built for. Security isn't a separate concern for me; it's the lens through which I evaluate every architectural decision. What I care about most is building teams that outlast any single project. I've mentored engineers from intern to senior-level contributors, hired 15+ engineers across the org, and conducted 300+ interviews — including 20+ for senior leadership roles. I believe great engineering orgs are built on clarity of ownership, honest feedback, and giving people room to grow into problems slightly bigger than they think they can handle. I'm also active in the Python community — I co-chaired PyCon India 2021 and help organize BangPypers, Bangalore's Python user group. Always happy to connect with people working on hard infrastructure, security, or AI safety problems.

Experience

9 yrs 10 mos
Total Experience
4 yrs 11 mos
Average Tenure
8 yrs 4 mos
Current Experience

Cyware

5 roles

Senior Engineering Manager

Promoted

Sep 2024Present · 1 yr 8 mos

  • Led engineering for Cyware’s Orchestrate product—the automation and operationalization layer underpinning Cyware’s threat intel and other platforms, deployed to 90%+ of customers and central to the company’s threat-intel operationalization mission. Managed a team of 13 engineers including a QA Tech Lead who independently owned the quality function.
  • Led the architecture overhaul of the platform from a monolithic system to a microservices-based, multi-tenant architecture, delivering ~7× performance improvement while running on 1/9th of the original infrastructure cost . The multi-tenant design removed the entry barrier for new customers by enabling a free tier, directly expanding the addressable market.
  • Owned and executed the full customer migration from the legacy platform to the next-generation system, including migration sequencing, impact analysis, mitigation strategies, and rollback planning—coordinating across DevOps, Solutions Architecture, and Customer Success to ensure zero-disruption transitions.
  • Drove the agentic AI initiative from concept to first version in ~2.5 months with a 7-person cross-functional team (3 BE, 2 FE, 1 QA, 1 PM). Navigated rapidly evolving requirements by identifying stable vs. volatile scope and sequencing work to minimize rework, enabling higher-order automation that reduces analyst time and improves customer ROI.
  • Actively invested in career development—mentored 2 engineers from junior roles to independently owning system architecture and leading workstreams, and grew 7–8 engineers from intern to senior-level contributors within 3–4 years each.
  • Maintained regular syncs with the VP of Engineering and CTO, providing insights on roadmap priorities, platform health, and technical investment trade-offs to inform leadership decision-making.
Hands-on Technical LeadershipTechnical LeadershipEngineering ManagementDistributed SystemsAgentic AI DevelopmentGo (Programming Language)+11

Engineering Manager

Mar 2021Oct 2024 · 3 yrs 7 mos

  • Owned the technical direction, roadmap, and delivery of the Orchestrate product, defining quarterly milestones and translating product goals into execution plans for a cross-functional team of 10+ engineers (backend, frontend, QA).
  • Led development of a playbook execution engine based on Directed Acyclic Graphs (DAGs), supporting complex automation workflows across multiple products.
  • Established engineering practices around execution quality and career growth, setting the foundation for a high-performing team that scaled with the product.
Software Engineering PracticesSecurityRelational DatabasesElasticsearchREST APIsDatabases+3

Software Architect

Promoted

Jun 2019Mar 2021 · 1 yr 9 mos

  • Working as architect for both CFTR and CSOL product.
  • Involved in requirement discussion with the product managers
  • Involved in design and architecture discussion with the development team
  • Fine Tuning systems for performance and scalability
  • Involved in evaluating different technologies and finding best fit for the given use-case.
Relational DatabasesREST APIsDatabasesGo (Programming Language)

Senior Software Engineer

Jun 2018May 2019 · 11 mos

  • Designed and Developed backend of Cyware Security and Orchestration Layer (CSOL) product from scratch which comes under the category of SOAR platform.
  • Features developed in CSOL platform includes apps framework so the platform can interact with many other platforms, playbook framework providing execution capability across different products like a flowchart.
Databases

Software Engineer

Nov 2017May 2018 · 6 mos

  • Designed and Developed backend of Cyware Fusion Threat Response (CFTR) product from scratch.
  • Features developed in CFTR platform includes multi-tenant architecture, dynamic form fields providing greater customization, activity audit logs, Role Base and Data Level Access control mechanism
  • Used different design patterns like adapter, strategic, facade, etc. making the platforms customizable and scalable.
  • Developed a prototype for authentication using blockchain technology.
Databases

Hackerearth

3 roles

Software Engineer

May 2016Nov 2017 · 1 yr 6 mos · Bengaluru Area, India

  • Developed deployment infrastructure for containers deployment.
  • Contributed in developing infrastructure for evaluation of big data problems using hadoop.
  • Contributed in developing the circles product end-to-end. Used django rest framework and react.js.
  • Introduced various kinds of problems (Machine learning, SQL) with practice product.
  • Introduced gamification elements like weekly leaderboard to increase user engagement and retention.
  • Improved server response time to ~300ms and SEO using schema markup.

Software Engineering Intern

Jan 2016Apr 2016 · 3 mos · Bengaluru Area, India

  • Worked with B2C team and worked on following tasks:
  • Enhanced comments framework:
  • Edit comment option
  • Voting option
  • Contributed in developing new practice section in both frontend and backend.
  • Worked with Plivo and Twilio api to get OTP via call also.

Software Engineering Intern

May 2015Jun 2015 · 1 mo · Bengaluru Area, India

  • Major tasks done during this period are as follows:
  • Generic user data collection framework :
  • (Framework developed at HackerEarth to collect user generic data)
  • 1. Enhanced framework functionality providing more control to developer over data collection.
  • 2. Developed other means for user data collection.
  • "Ask Me Anything" (AMA) enhancement:
  • (In an AMA session, host(s) answer(s) questions from HackerEarth users. )
  • 1. Developed registration feature.
  • 2. Google calendar integration.

Advaiya solutions

Web Development Intern

May 2014Jun 2014 · 1 mo · Udaipur

  • Worked as back-end web developer on "Action Udaipur" project, a unique initiative taken by Advaiya in collaboration with District administration Udaipur to help citizens turn ideas into action and perform action for the betterment of the society, community or city.

Education

The LNM Institute of Information Technology

Bachelor of Technology (B.Tech.) — Computer Science

Jan 2012Jan 2016

Stackforce found 100+ more professionals with Engineering Management & Distributed Systems

Explore similar profiles based on matching skills and experience