# Akshay Kawale

> Staff Engineer at VMware

Location: San Francisco Bay Area, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/akshaykawale

Systems Software Developer with extensive experience developing core Operating System, Networking and Cluster infrastructure. In-depth and broad technical foundation developed through 9 years of industry experience, built on a rigorous academic foundation. Experience supporting cross functional teams and providing domain expertise in Operating Systems and Networking.

I have worked on various aspect of NetApp's Data Ontap and FreeBSD operating systems, from low level elements like memory management, bootloader, hardware NICs, to the TCP/IP MP Networking Stack, performance tuning, as well as userspace development using a distributed cluster management framework.

I've had interactions with almost every Ontap subsystem/team and have assisted them in triaging, root causing and resolving issues involving memory management and corruptions, kernel APIs, scheduling, network performance, and mbuf corruption, linkage errors and reference count issues.

## Work Experience
### Staff Software Engineer @ VMware
Jan 2021 – Present

### Software Engineer @ Arista Networks
Jan 2016 – Jan 2021 | Santa Clara

### Member of Technical Staff @ NetApp
Jan 2014 – Jan 2016 | Sunnyvale
As a member of the Scale Out Networking group, I primarily working on:
• Enhancing and maintaining the TCP/IP Network Stack's MP architecture & threading model
• Incorporating the FreeBSD open source Network Stack into the Ontap ecosystem
• Network Performance, in particular on next generation systems with higher CPU count
• Cluster Performance
• Network Buffer (mbuf) infrastructure.
• Packet flood/DOS mitigation strategies
• Interfacing with the hardware NIC team

The position also involves offering expertise to and working with teams across NetApp to triage, root cause and fix network and cluster performance issues, and mbuf corruptions, linkage and reference count errors.

### Member of Technical Staff @ NetApp
Jan 2006 – Jan 2014 | Sunnyvale
Member of the team developing the core Data Ontap Operating System, the world's most widely used storage OS which is based on FreeBSD. I have worked on various aspect of the Operating System, all the way from low level elements like memory management and bootloaders, to writing userspace daemons and startup scripts.

Some of my responsibilities have included:
• Memory Management
• Integrating the core Ontap kernel module into the FreeBSD ecosystem
• Booting including the Bootloader, Bootmenu and user space startup scripts
• Supportability including a mechanism to automatically triage user space cores, and logging 
• Timekeeping and timezone services
• Cluster management using a distributed framework, database and APIs
• Console and admin access issues

A large part of my role also involved providing technical expertise and debugging help to engineering groups that use the underlying services provided by us, and triaging, root causing and fixing incoming bugs.

### Member of Technical Staff @ NetApp
Jan 2006 – Jan 2008 | Sunnyvale
Member of the vFiler Multistore team. vFiler is a product that compartmentalize storage resources on a NetApp data storage system into distinct administrative units, allowing multitenancy on a single storage system.

This product cut across and encompassed every major subsystem in Data Ontap from protocols like NFS and CIFS to the WAFL file system, networking, high availability, data protection, recovery and mirroring, etc.


## Education
### Master’s Degree in Operating Systems, Distributed Systems, Networking, Security
Carnegie Mellon University

### Bachelor’s Degree in Computer Engineering, Computer Science
University of Mumbai

### High School
Jai Hindu jobs


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/akshaykawale

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Source: https://flows.cv/akshaykawale
JSON Resume: https://flows.cv/akshaykawale/resume.json
Last updated: 2026-04-12