Engineer Engineering

AJAY KACHRANI

** ***** ***** • Nashua, NH ***** • 1-603-***-**** • *********@*****.***

PROFESSIONAL SUMMARY

A Senior Engineering Management Professional and hands on dynamic leader with extensive

technical and operational leadership experience delivering engineering product development from

concept, to architecture and through to delivery from startup phase to a successful public company.

Built and led teams across multiple countries, delivered high quality Carrier class software and

hardware to Tier 1 companies across the board. Selected accomplishments include:

• Key member of the technology driven transformation team that helped drive the company’s external

strategy in the areas of IP, MPLS, Carrier Ethernet, and Mobile backhauling resulted in product

deployment and expansion in the core of the Tier-1 backbone.

• Strong finance background helped manage P&L in excess of $10M in salaries, capital expenses, and

project expenses. Developed zero based budgets to be within P&L requirements.

• Successfully established two grounds up Offshore Development Centers (ODC) to develop and test

real time software in India. Proven track record to driving projects across functional areas. Delivered

complex software releases on time to meet market dates.

• Negotiated third party contracts, statements of work, and term sheets to support third party vendors

for OEM, outsourcing contracts, and partners.

• Established key metrics to drive accountability and ownership of all functions in the software

development and SQA cycle. Developed high concentration on quality, testing strategies, training and

cross-functional team work across different organizations.

PROFESSIONAL EXPERIENCE

AVICI SYSTEMS, Billerica, MA 1997–2009

One of the leading carrier class Internet backbone Core Router hardware/software manufacturer

SOAPSTONE NETWORKS, Billerica, MA

Avici Systems transitioned to Soapstone Networks developing Carrier Ethernet Control Plane Software

Consultant to CTO Office/Senior Product Management 2008-2009

Director of Software Engineering 2000-2008

Consulting Engineer/Technical Manager 1997-1999

Director of Software Engineering

Managed all aspects of the software development challenges in a startup to mid-size company

• Developed and directed software engineering teams from startup phase to 130-people strong multi-

site development organization. Delivered on-time highly complex, and high-available carrier-class

software (BGP, IGPs, PIM, MSDP, LDP, TE) and hardware (POS, GiGE) using custom ASICs/FPGA

and Intel NP based line cards that resulted in securing the company’s first tier-1 customer.

• Streamlined product requirements by working closely with the company’s Executive Management,

Product Management, Sales Executives, and meeting with key customers including AT&T, MCI,

Level-3, Nortel, Huawei, KDDI, spanning different geographic locations worldwide.

• Led multiple new technologies, some of them being first in the industry such as high availability

solution for control-plane and IP FRR with complex algorithms that met and exceeded customer’s

expectations and increased in the company’s revenue by 20%.

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AJAY KACHANI • 21 LOJKO DRIVE • NASHUA, NH 03062 • 1-603-***-**** • *********@*****.***

• Successfully delivered off shore projects by organizing team leaders on both shores working in

concert solving unique challenges. Instituted uniform development and testing methodology, project

schedules and kept tight control on all development and SQA details..

• Focused on high-availability and sub-seconds protocol convergence at Layer-1 (APS), Layer-2

(Aggregate Links) and Layer-3 (IGP-TE and LDP) and developed plans to support BFD/VRRP.

Consulting Engineer/Technical Manager

• Responsible for leading and architecting Avici's MPLS/Traffic Engineering implementation in a

Differentiated Services model. The MPLS-TE project had started during the infancy of the technology.

Interoperability with other industry standard implementations required meeting with various leading

US Internet Service Providers as well as participating in IETF Working Groups.

Consultant to CTO Office/Senior Product Management

• Played key role in technology driven transformation that helped drive company’s external strategy in

the areas of PB, PBB, PBT-TE with Ring Topology Protocols such as EAPS, MRP, and xSTP based

protocols conforming to key industry forms such as MEF, IEEE, ITU-T, and IETF standards.

• Championed requirements and solutions for mobile backhauling market by investigating the current

Mobile broadband infrastructure (such as CDMA/EV-DO and GSM/UMTS/HSPA) today and well

suited to support WiMAX, LTE, and Fixed mobile (FMC) Convergence over GPON utilizing IP/MPLS

and Carrier Ethernet protocols.

• Participated in determining engineering and testing strategies for end-to-end service creation in the

areas of Ethernet Virtual and Private Lines, LAN (Multi-point to Multi-point) and E-TREE (for IPTV)

over mixed Layer-2 Ethernet and VPLS network across any two UNIs, I-NNIs or E-NNIs.

• Developed high-availability and high-reliability solutions for control-plane that delivers sub-seconds

convergence on a highly secured carrier-grade Linux Platform. The control-plane can be co-located

or anti-located to provide protection against site-failures.

PRIOR EXPERIENCE

Held many Software Engineering and Project Lead positions at:

Digital Equipment Corporation, NH, Software to Principal Engineer 1985-1992/1996-1997

• Enhanced UNIX networking kernel code in (MP) multi-processing environment for secured socket to

support C2 Security, implemented TCP and interface address hashing for web hosting with 10x

performance improvement.

Banyan Systems, MA, Engineering Consultant 1993-1994

• Responsible for Banyan VINES stack to run over Solaris in multi-threading MP environments.

Developed IP tunneling to allow Banyan VINES traffic to flow over Internet backbone.

Boston Technology, MA, Engineering Consultant 1995

• Enhanced the Alcatel X.25 code to run over Unixware IP stack. Solved congestion issues in the

Tokyo’s live telephone network at two NTT locations in Japan.

EDUCATION

• MBA Corporate Entrepreneurship, F.W. Olin Graduate School of Business at Babson College, MA (May 2009)

• MS Computer Engineering, University of Massachusetts, MA (1986)

• BE Electronics and Communications Engineering, University of Mysore, India (1983)

TECHNOLOGY EXPERIENCE

SOA, IMS, TCP/IP, Unix Kernel, MPLS, RSVP, LDP, QinQ, PBB, EAPS, xSTP, VPN, Diffsrv, VoIP, IPTV,

ELAN, ELINE, BGP, OSPF, ISIS, PIM, SIP, BFD, SLA, OAM, CDMA, GSM, GPON, C/C++, Perl

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