# nikunj kela

> Principal Engineer at SiMa.ai

Location: San Jose, California, United States
Profile: https://flows.cv/nikunjkela

Development of the PCIe host driver, SPI interface driver for ARM based SoC
•	Implement the PCIe host controller driver for Synopsis DesignWare PCIe controller
•	Implement the SPI interface driver for Synopsis DesignWare SPI controller
•	Kexec/Kdump support enablement for ARM A53 based Cisco SoC
Creating and maintaining kernel git repository for each platform
•	Creation of kernel branches in git repo for different platform
•	Integrating the kernel SDK from vendor into kernel branches 
•	Packaging the new kernel and publishing to different platforms
•	Supporting kernel upgrade without breaking software redundancy
Design and development of the bootloader for Catalyst 3K switches
•	Design the bootloader for the new ARM based platform with the support of secure boot.
•	Implement the boot loader solution for the new platform 
•	Feasibility study on UEFI based bootloader and the migration to it.
CPU/SoC performance benchmark and Selection
•	Integrate the CPU benchmarking tool and automate their run on the new boards
•	Run the Cisco IOL (IOS on Linux) and assess performance of BGP routing
•	Generating reports with the performance data to use in CPU selection process

Awards/Activities
•	Research paper entitled: Illumination Invariant Elastic Bunch Graph Matching for Efficient Face Recognition was published in IEEE Computer Society Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition held in NewYork in June 2006.

The abstract of the paper can be found on the following link:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/search/freesrchabstract.jsp?arnumber=1640482&isnumber=34371&punumber=10922&k2dockey=1640482@ieeecnfs&query=%28retinex%29+%3Cin%3E+metadata&pos=7
•	IBM recognitions, TOP TALENT, BRAVO award, THANK YOU award 
•	Cisco Recognition, CAP Awards

## Work Experience
### Principal Engineer @ SiMa.ai
Jan 2026 – Present | San Jose, CA

### Member of Technical Staff @ SiMa.ai
Jan 2024 – Jan 2026 | San Jose, California, United States

### Senior Staff Software Engineer @ Qualcomm
Jan 2022 – Present | San Diego, California, United States

### Senior Principal Software Engineer @ Dell
Jan 2020 – Present | Santa Clara County, California, United States

### Technical Lead @ Cisco
Jan 2015 – Jan 2020 | San Jose

### Member of Technical Staff @ Riverbed Technology
Jan 2014 – Jan 2015 | Sunnyvale, CA, USA

### Software Engineer @ Cisco Systems San Jose
Jan 2012 – Jan 2014 | San Jose
Linux Kernel Device Drivers Development
PCIe drivers with surprised removal/online insertion development
Machine Check and other exception handling
Scheduler development to get increased throughput
Bootloader development including DRAM init, console init, ethernet init etc.

### Senior Software Developer @ IBM
Jan 2005 – Jan 2010

### Research Associate @ IIT Kanpur
Jan 2004 – Jan 2005
Worked in IIT Kanpur as a research associate under the guidance of Prof. Dr. Phalguni Gupta( Computer Science Department).


## Education
### MS in Computer Science
North Carolina State University

### B.Tech in Computer Science
Harcourt Butler Technological Institure


## Contact & Social
- LinkedIn: https://linkedin.com/in/nikunj-kela-2736ba9

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