Thilak Raj Surendra Babu is a seasoned Software Architect with over 18 years of specialized experience in networking product development, currently serving at Zscaler since January 2023. Throughout his career, he has demonstrated exceptional expertise in SDN, SD-WAN, Cloud Gateways, forwarding infrastructure, SSL-VPN, VOIP Gateway, and caching engine technologies. His technical acumen in large-scale networking forwarding infrastructure has been recognized through two patents and contributions to prominent open-source projects including pktgen-dpdk and OVS.
At Zscaler, Thilak has made a significant impact by architecting and leading the development of a complex branch connector device, which achieved over 300 real-world deployments within a year. He built a highly scalable, multi-tenant Source IP-based anchoring solution for Zscaler's cloud platform based on OVS, where he identified critical bottlenecks and improved the connection tracking module performance. His exceptional contributions have earned him multiple Bravo awards and the CEO's special Grant for helping drive the company toward $5 billion ARR. As an architect, he has become the go-to expert for data-plane and advanced platform solutions within the ZIA organization.
Before Zscaler, Thilak served as Staff Software Engineer and SDN Architect at Nutanix from May 2021 to January 2023, where he led the data plane acceleration initiative by integrating OVS-DPDK with the Nutanix stack. He evaluated cutting-edge technologies, including eBPF/AFXDP, vDPA, and Smart NICs, while building eBPF-based debugging tools and test infrastructure for networking performance measurement. At VMware, from October 2018 to May 2021, he led the fast path team in identifying complex bottlenecks and re-architecting pipeline aspects to increase performance across all platforms significantly. He successfully built a new IPv6 pipeline in record time and developed essential tooling for in-house and customer deployment troubleshooting.
Thilak spent nearly nine years at Juniper Networks from February 2010 to October 2018, where he worked across multiple critical projects. Starting at Ankeena Networks, which was acquired by Juniper, he developed as a full-stack generalist, building core components for management, multi-tenancy, resiliency, and networking infrastructure. He later contributed to the Junos Virtual App Engine, creating proprietary high-performance guest packet paths based on IVSHMEM. In the Contrail project, he built services for discovering, re-imaging, provisioning, and monitoring servers with Contrail networking and OpenStack software. His work on vPTX/VMX included building core pieces of the virtualized packet path and re-architecting VMX to a multi-queue pipeline, enabling it to reach 100G throughput for 512-byte packet sizes.
Thilak holds a Master of Science in Software Systems from BITS, Pilani, India, completed in June 2010, and a Bachelor of Computer Engineering from Velammal Engineering College, Chennai, India, completed in May 2006. Beyond his professional achievements, he has demonstrated athletic excellence as a three-time runner-up in Basketball Zonal competitions and earned 3rd place in the All India Karate Championship in 2009. Based in San Jose, California, Thilak continues to push the boundaries of networking technology while mentoring teams and driving innovation in data plane architecture.