MAM
Microsoft AI welcomes Umesh Shankar as VP, engineering for AI safety
Mumbai: Microsoft AI has appointed Umesh Shankar as corporate vice president of engineering, where he will spearhead initiatives in AI innovation, security and privacy.Shankar brings nearly two decades of experience from Google, where he served as chief technologist for Google Cloud Security and engineering director for Google Assistant Ecosystem. His work focused on strengthening AI security frameworks and advancing data protection to enhance user trust and safety.
At Microsoft, he will direct efforts to develop responsible AI, ensuring secure and ethical AI integration across products and services. His appointment underscores Microsoft’s commitment to advancing AI with robust privacy and security standards, reinforcing its global AI-driven strategy.
His work focused on making GCP the safest environment for AI development and leveraging AI to tackle critical security challenges, such as cloud posture management, threat intelligence, fraud prevention, and secops. Prior to this, he was engineering director for Google Assistant’s Ecosystem, handle a team of 180 engineers across global locations to develop AI-driven services like duplex on the web, actions on Google, identity and transactions APIs. His earlier tenure at Google also included pioneering efforts in data protection, key management, authentication, authorization, auditing, and insider risk controls, building security infrastructure used across Google’s products and services. Notably, he led the access transparency project, providing Google Cloud customers with real-time logs of data access events, unlocking nearly 900 million dollars in revenue. Before joining Google, he held roles as an advisor at LiquidTalent, a research intern at IBM T.J. Watson Research Center, and a software engineer at Idiom Technologies.
Shankar holds a PhD and M.S. in Computer Science with a focus on security and privacy from the University of California, Berkeley, and a B.A. in Computer Science from Harvard University. His extensive expertise in AI security and privacy positions him to play a crucial role in shaping Microsoft AI’s responsible AI initiatives and strengthening its global AI-driven strategy.
Brands
Tessolve lands a semiconductor veteran to drive its next big push
Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, who started his career at ISRO and has spent 35 years building chips and companies, joins the Bengaluru-based firm as president and chief operating officer
BENGALURU: Tessolve has never been shy about its ambitions. The Bengaluru-based engineering services firm already counts 18 of the world’s top 20 semiconductor companies among its clients, employs more than 3,500 engineers across 12 countries, and last year pocketed a $150m investment from TPG. Now it has hired the executive it believes can turn those assets into something bigger. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, a 35-year semiconductor veteran who once built satellite payloads for ISRO and has since scaled engineering organisations across three continents, joins as president and chief operating officer, effective immediately.
THE MAN AND THE MANDATE
The appointment is, by any measure, a serious hire. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu comes to Tessolve after senior leadership stints at HCL Technologies, Altran and Wipro, where he managed large profit-and-loss portfolios and oversaw cross-regional teams. Over the course of his career, he has been instrumental in bringing more than 1,000 new products to market across the high-tech, energy and manufacturing verticals. Before the private sector claimed him, he began his working life as a scientist at the Indian Space Research Organisation, contributing to research and development in charge-coupled device technology and satellite payloads, a foundation that shaped everything that followed.
In his new role, he will lead Tessolve’s global growth strategy: expanding its engineering capabilities, deepening customer relationships and accelerating innovation across semiconductor and high-performance computing domains. The brief is broad, but the context is specific. Tessolve operates in the $550 billion global semiconductor market, and its recent moves, the acquisition of Germany’s Dream Chip Technologies and the TPG funding round, have sharpened both its reach and its expectations.
Srini Chinamilli, co-founder and chief executive of Tessolve, is characteristically direct about why Ravi Kumar Chirugudu was the choice:
“As we scale our global semiconductor and system engineering capabilities, Ravi’s appointment marks an important step forward. As global semiconductor demand continues to accelerate across industries, it is creating significant opportunities across the semiconductor lifecycle, from design, packaging, validation and systems integration. Ravi’s deep knowledge and leadership in this ecosystem brings the right mix of industry expertise, customer connect and execution capability, which will play a key role in strengthening our position as a trusted global engineering partner and reinforcing our market leadership.”
THE NEW ARRIVAL SPEAKS
Ravi Kumar Chirugudu, for his part, frames the move in terms of timing and culture, two factors that veteran executives tend to weigh as heavily as title or compensation:
“I am happy to join Tessolve at a time when the industry is rapidly evolving towards more complex, AI-driven systems. What stands out to me is its strong people-first culture and its commitment to bringing value to its customers. The strength of its global team, combined with its deep expertise in semiconductor innovation and next-generation product engineering, creates a solid foundation to build differentiated, scalable solutions. I look forward to working closely with the team to drive strategic growth and strengthen its role in shaping the global semiconductor ecosystem.”
The reference to AI-driven systems is not incidental. The semiconductor industry is in the midst of a structural reshaping, driven by the insatiable compute demands of artificial intelligence. For engineering services firms like Tessolve, which offers end-to-end capabilities from silicon design to packaged parts and invests in high-performance computing, high-speed interfaces, photonics and 5G, the moment is both an opportunity and a test. The company says it is well positioned to capture the next wave of industry growth. Ravi Kumar Chirugudu is now the person who has to prove it.
He came in from outer space, literally, and spent three decades learning how the semiconductor industry works from the inside out. Now Tessolve is betting that accumulated knowledge can help it cross the next frontier. In the $550 billion global chip market, the gap between ambition and execution is measured in engineering hours and leadership quality. Tessolve has just gone shopping for both.
