---
title: "Rakesh Khanduja - Principal Software Engineer Lead in Bengaluru | Tal"
description: "Meet Rakesh Khanduja, Technology Executive | AI, Data & Security Platforms | Enterprise Agentic AI | 22+ Years Building Global Products & Teams | 6 US Patents | Ex-CTO based in Bengaluru. AI stack includes anthropic apis, antigravity, and claude code."
image: "https://tal.club/meet/rakesh-khanduja/share-image"
---

# Rakesh Khanduja on Tal

## Headline

Technology Executive \| AI, Data & Security Platforms \| Enterprise Agentic AI \| 22\+ Years Building Global Products & Teams \| 6 US Patents \| Ex\-CTO

## About

Technology leader with 22\+ years of experience building enterprise software, data, security and cloud platforms at scale\. My career spans software engineering, architecture, product development, CTO leadership and senior technology leadership, including my current role at Microsoft and previous leadership at BlueTalon\. I have designed and delivered enterprise platforms supporting 1,000\+ customers, 50\+ connected data sources and 100\+ PB of data, led 50\+ engineers and architects across multi\-organization teams, and driven multi\-million\-dollar cost savings through architecture redesign and platform optimization\. Today, my focus is at the intersection of AI, Data and Security—and on the architecture required to make AI reliable and useful in real enterprise environments\. Areas I work deeply in include: → Generative AI & LLM applications → Agentic AI & multi\-step orchestration → AI\-ready enterprise data → Context engineering & knowledge layers → RAG & semantic retrieval → Semantic caching & AI economics → MCP & enterprise tool integration → AI security, governance & guardrails → AI observability, evaluation & runtime control → Enterprise data platforms & cloud architecture I believe the next generation of enterprise AI will not be won by models alone\. The real differentiation will come from the data, context, control, security and infrastructure surrounding the models\. That's where I'm particularly interested in building and contributing\. 6 US patents \| Enterprise Data & Security \| AI Platforms \| Cloud Architecture

## Location

Bengaluru

## AI stack

anthropic apis

antigravity

claude code

gemini

langgraph

langsmith

## Work experience

Principal Software Engineer Lead at Microsoft, Aug 2019 \- Present · 7 yrs 1 mo, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Lead architecture and technical direction for Microsoft Purview, working across geographically distributed engineering organizations in the US, Europe and India\. Lead and mentor 50\+ engineers and architects across multi\-organization teams\. Delivered enterprise platform capabilities supporting 1,000\+ customers, 50\+ connected data sources and 100\+ PB of data\. Drove multi\-million\-dollar cost savings through architecture redesign, platform optimization and technology simplification\. Architected enterprise data security, governance and compliance capabilities across large\-scale cloud data environments\.

Senior Technical Director at BlueTalon \| Unified Data Access Control, Aug 2018 \- Aug 2019 · 1 yr 1 mo, Bengaluru Area, India, Driving the unified data access control technology stack & innovation for Hadoop and relational databases\. Driving the architecture of the product and technology vision with great team\. Driving the key innovations and patents with team\.

Technical Director at BlueTalon \| Unified Data Access Control, Jan 2016 \- Jul 2018 · 2 yrs 7 mos, Bangalore Area, India, Technical Leadership in execution of the unified data access control for Hadoop distributions \(HDP,MapR,CDH\) and Relational databases \(PostgreSQL,GreenPlum\)\. Designed the architecture of a robust interception points for unified access control for SQL systems in modern data lakes\. Leading the team and product development with senior engineers to create the world class unified data access control\.

Technical Director at DB Research Pvt\. Ltd, Sep 2010 \- Dec 2015 · 5 yrs 4 mos, Indore Area, India, Leadership role in driving the technology vision to implement the secured federated data access across the heterogeneous data sources\(Oracle,DB2,SQLServer,Netezza,PostgreSQL,MySQL\) Built the multiple product lines Secure Office , Enterprise Access Control, Secure Enterprise Federated Access, Secure Access Control for ODBC & JDBC Adapters and deployed the product to Fortune 100 customers in Health Care and Financial Domain\. Built the world class technology for customers with very few smart engineers\.

CTO at BD Innoware Pvt\. Ltd, Nov 2003 \- Aug 2010 · 6 yrs 10 mos, Indore Area, India, Leadership role in research and creating the technology stack for data access control and federated data access for multiple data sources \(Oracle,DB2,SQLServer\)\. Created a team of research engineers and developed a world class technology to smartly process the database requests for implementing the access control and audit frameworks for enterprise applications\. Great experience & achievement in turning the entry level and mid level engineers into highly productive startup team\.

Software Engineer at BD Innoware Pvt Ltd, Nov 2003 \- Jun 2006 · 2 yrs 8 mos, Indore Area, India, Started my journey as the software research engineer in BD Innoware pvt\. ltd\. Here I was responsible to develop the database security controls and research on data processing algorithms\. As part of development I used C,C\+\+,MFC,ActiveX,COM,DCOM , Linux, AIX, Oracle, DB2,SQL Server to develop the enterprise tools for data processing , workflow and data control\.

## Education

BE, Information technology, Shri Vaishnav Institute of Technology & Science, Baroli, Sanwar Road, Indore

[View the original profile](https://tal.club/meet/rakesh-khanduja)

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