Kishore Thakur

About Kishore Thakur

Technology Executive | Cloud Platform Engineering, Observability, SRE & AI TransformationStrategic engineering leader with over 22 years of progressive experience driving innovation at Zscaler, ServiceNow, JPMorgan, Apple and Poly. I specialize in architecting world-class Cloud Operations & Engineering, Observability, SRE platforms, and AI ecosystems designed for massive-scale traffic (500B+ transactions/day) and availability.Throughout my career, I have focused on the intersection of technical excellence and business value—managing multi-million dollar budgets, leading 200+ global FTEs, and delivering $18M+ in annual OpEx savings through strategic automation and tool consolidation. I am a business-aligned leader dedicated to reducing customer friction and accelerating Time-to-Market (TTM).Core Expertise: Scale: Building \"Zero-to-One\" global organizations and supporting $50B+ revenue trajectories.🤖 Innovation: Pioneering Agentic AI, AIOps, and Telemetry Data Lakes to compress MTTD/MTTM. Efficiency: Drastically reducing technology costs while increasing engineering velocity.🤝 Leadership: Mentoring high-performance, psychologically safe teams across US and India.Specialties:Cloud Transformation (AWS/GCP/Azure) • Site Reliability Engineering (SRE) • Agentic AI/ML-Ops • Platform Engineering • Observability Engineering • Data Pipelines & Management • Config Management• Chaos Engineering • P&L Management • Global Talent Acquisition.I am always interested in connecting with fellow technology leaders and discussing the future of AI-driven infrastructure and Transformation.

Experience

1. Senior Director, Global Cloud Platform and Tooling Eng

   Zscaler

   May 2024 — Present · Hyderabad, IN

   Cloud Reliability Engineering and Infrastructure ServicesAs Global Senior Director of SRE/Cloud Platform Eng at Zscaler, I lead the vision, architecture, and execution of intelligent, secure, and scalable platforms that serve as the backbone of our global cloud operations. My organization drives engineering velocity, platform standardization, and operational resilience across both commercial and regulated environments.I oversee a diverse and strategic portfolio—including our global Observability Platform, automation and configuration management, ServiceNow Platform, Chaos Engineering, Incident Management, Kubernetes Fabric, multi-cloud infrastructure (AWS, GCP, Azure), core Systems Engineering, CI/CD frameworks, and service health platforms.By embedding AI/ML into these systems, we enable intelligent alerting, predictive diagnostics, and autonomous remediation—elevating reliability and transforming how teams build, operate, and scale services.Collaborating closely with engineering, product, cloud, and security leaders, I ensure that platform strategy aligns with business goals—driving innovation, ensuring compliance, and strengthening customer trust.I’m passionate about building future-ready platforms, enabling high-performing teams, and shaping the evolution of cloud reliability engineering at scale.

Education

• Indian Institute of Management, Kozhikode

  Senior Management Programme, Strategy, Finance and Economics

• Indian Institute of Management, Calcutta

  Senior Management Programme, Business Analytics

• Sikkim Manipal Institute of Technology - SMU

  Master of Business Administration - MBA, Information Systems

  2010

• Kakatiya University (University College of Pharmaceutical Sciences)

  Bachelor of Science - BS, Computers, Maths, Physics

  2002

Skills

• System Architecture
• Oracle
• Containers
• Cloud Computing
• Solaris Zones
• Aix
• Emc Storage
• Infrastructure
• Vmware Infrastructure
• Red Hat Linux
• Solaris
• Performance Tuning
• Nas
• Virtualization
• Clariion
• Networking
• Sunsystems
• Lpar
• Veritas Cluster Server
• Vmware Esx
• Ibm Servers
• Servers
• Netbackup
• Symmetrix
• Linux
• System Administration
• Vmware
• Shell Scripting
• Emc Symmetrix
• Netapp
• Nfs
• Switches
• High Availability
• Operating Systems
• Emc
• Security
• Perl
• Unix
• Hardware
• Veritas Volume Manager