Headline

Founder, Airlock — Identity & policy enforcement for AI agents | Ex-NPCI (UPI · CBDC)

About

I spent five years inside India's national payments infrastructure at NPCI — automation for UPI (723M+ peak daily transactions across 300+ banks), core infrastructure for the Digital Rupee (CBDC rollout across 50+ banks), and most recently leading enterprise AI strategy, where I built and deployed the org-wide generative AI platform. Payments taught me one discipline: no action moves without authorization, and every decision leaves a record that survives an audit. Then AI agents started acting — writing code, touching data, executing workflows — with none of that discipline. A prompt-injected agent doesn't produce "harmful content"; it performs a legitimate operation the wrong way, and no guardrail catches it. That's not a content problem. It's an access-control problem. Now I build Airlock full-time: cryptographic identity for every agent, a deterministic policy check on every action before it executes, and signed, tamper-evident receipts an auditor can verify. Same input, same verdict — whatever model is driving. Policy, not probability. Open protocol, Apache-2.0 SDKs: github.com/airlock-protocol/airlock · Product: airlock.ing If your team is putting agents into production — or wondering how you'd prove what your agents did — I'd genuinely like to compare notes: contact@airlock.ing

Location

Hyderabad

AI stack

hugging face

langchain

langgraph

mcp

claudecode

LiteLLM

Work experience

Founding AI Engineer at Airlock, Jun 2026 - Present · 2 mo, Remote, Building Airlock — the enforcement and evidence layer for AI agents. Agents can now act: run code, touch data, move workflows. Airlock sits between an agent and its tools, verifies who the agent is, checks every action against deterministic policy before it executes, and produces a signed, tamper-evident receipt of every decision. Policy, not probability. Open protocol (Ed25519, OAuth 2.1, W3C DID — Apache-2.0 SDKs) with a commercial enforcement product on top. → airlock.ing

Senior Associate AI Enterprise Architect at National Payments Corporation Of India (NPCI), Aug 2025 - Jun 2026 · 11 mos, Hyderabad, Telangana, India, Directly collaborate with executive leadership to formulate and execute NPCI's corporate AI strategy, driving the transition to an AI-first organization. Key Achievements: Zero-to-One Product Leadership: Led the strategic vision, architecture, and single-handed development of Project N — an on-premises Enterprise AI Co-Pilot achieving 90% reduction in routine coding and information retrieval time. Platform Architecture & Deployment: Architected, built, and deployed a secure, org-wide Generative AI Platform with enterprise-grade Conversational AI and Code Generation capabilities, serving the entire organization and boosting productivity across teams. C-Suite Buy-In: Proactively identified a critical organizational need for secure generative AI, independently developed functional prototypes, and presented the vision and business case to the CEO and C-suite. R&D & Future-Proofing: Pioneered a long-range research initiative on hypothesis-driven learning to reduce data dependency and build compounding intelligence systems for future business challenges.

Senior Associate Devops - CBDC at National Payments Corporation Of India (NPCI), Jul 2023 - Aug 2025 · 2 yrs 2 mos, Core infrastructure engineer for India's Central Bank Digital Currency (Digital Rupee) — one of the most critical digital currency initiatives globally. Infrastructure at Scale: Designed and managed Kubernetes-based container orchestration and Terraform-provisioned cloud infrastructure supporting CBDC deployment across 50+ banks nationwide. CI/CD Pipeline Engineering: Built and maintained end-to-end CI/CD pipelines ensuring zero-downtime deployments for a system handling real-time digital currency transactions. DevOps Culture: Established monitoring, alerting, and observability practices for mission-critical financial infrastructure with 99.9%+ uptime requirements. Cross-Bank Coordination: Collaborated with 50+ banking partners on integration, deployment, and operational readiness for the Digital Rupee rollout.

Senior / Associate UPI QA & Automation at National Payments Corporation Of India (NPCI), Jul 2021 - Jul 2023 · 2 y, Hyderabad, Led quality assurance and automation for UPI (Unified Payments Interface) — India's real-time payment system processing 723M+ peak daily transactions across 300+ banks. → Test Automation at Scale: Designed and implemented comprehensive automation frameworks for validating payment flows across hundreds of banking integrations. → Performance & Reliability: Ensured transaction processing reliability at massive scale — supporting the world's largest real-time payments ecosystem. → Cross-Functional Leadership: Coordinated testing strategies across multiple banking partners and internal engineering teams.

Education

Bachelor of Engineering - BE, Computer Software Engineering, Chitkara University

Public links

github: https://github.com/shivdeep1