Founder & Lead Developer
Storage Benchmark Kit (SBK)
A modular Java framework that measures throughput and latency through a common workload engine across object stores, message systems, databases, file systems, caches and local queues.
Technology Leader
Dr. Keshava Munegowda
Senior Principal Software Engineer · Dell Technologies · OBS
Architecting high-performance storage and distributed systems—from embedded file systems to cloud-scale data platforms—with 23+ years of hands-on engineering and technical leadership.
23+years in systems engineering
6granted US patents
2published technical books
15+research papers & conference talks
Executive profile
Technology leader, system architect, researcher and open-source founder with deep expertise in distributed storage, object and streaming platforms, performance engineering, file-system internals and systems software. Career spans Dell Technologies, Goldman Sachs, Texas Instruments and product-engineering organizations, combining architecture ownership with low-level implementation expertise in C/C++, Java and Python.
Known for translating complex performance and reliability problems into reusable platforms, measurement frameworks and production-ready designs. Brings technical breadth, product judgment and engineering credibility to enterprise technology leadership.
Technology StrategySystem ArchitectureDistributed Systems
Object & Streaming StoragePerformance EngineeringOpen-Source Leadership
Reliability & ResilienceTechnical Due DiligenceEngineering Mentorship
Leadership value
| Architecture & strategy | Engineering depth | Innovation & influence |
|---|---|---|
| Platform architecture, technical roadmaps, system trade-offs and competitive analysis | Distributed storage, file systems, concurrency, benchmarking, observability and cloud deployment | Open-source founder, patented inventor, published author, researcher and conference speaker |
Professional experience
Dell Technologies · Senior Principal Software Engineer, OBS
06 April 2026 — Present · Bengaluru, India
- Senior-principal engineering role for OBS, applying deep storage, distributed-systems and performance expertise to product architecture and engineering.
- Provide architectural guidance across scalability, reliability, performance, observability and operability concerns.
- Connect system-level design decisions with measurable workload behavior and production outcomes.
Goldman Sachs · Vice President, SecDB Engineering
August 2020 — 23 February 2026 · Bengaluru, India
- Designed and implemented automatic failover capabilities for TDMS and SARAL.
- Led performance-engineering work for business-critical systems, diagnosing bottlenecks and improving operational resilience.
- Contributed architecture and hands-on engineering expertise within the SecDB engineering organization.
Dell EMC · Senior Principal Engineer
February 2013 — August 2020 · Bengaluru, India
- Architected software for the Data Computing Appliance (DCA).
- Led performance engineering for Pravega, a distributed streaming-storage platform.
- Conducted architectural and performance comparisons across Pravega, Kafka, Pulsar, NATS and RabbitMQ.
- Founded and developed Storage Benchmark Kit (SBK), creating a common framework for storage and messaging workload evaluation.
Texas Instruments · Lead Engineer
January 2006 — February 2013
- Designed and implemented FAT12/16/32, exFAT and transaction-safe file-system capabilities for embedded storage.
- Developed USB host-controller and MMC/SD, SATA and SSD device-driver technologies.
- Advanced file-system performance, endurance, metadata safety and power-fail resilience through patented work and published research.
Sasken Technologies · Software Engineer
August 2004 — December 2005
- Designed and implemented NAND and NOR flash-memory device drivers.
Global Edge · Project Trainee Engineer
July 2003 — August 2004
- Designed and implemented EAP, EAP-TLS and EAP-TTLS authentication and security protocols for wireless LAN systems.
Open-source architecture & products
SBK Dashboard
Lifecycle-managed Prometheus and Grafana platform for persistent performance history, endpoint management and multi-target comparison.
SBK Analytics
Performance benchmarking and analytics workflow that extends SBK results into comparative, actionable analysis.
SBK Charts
Visualization and AI-assisted analysis for SBK performance results.
Concurrent Queue Evaluations
C++ benchmarking of concurrent queue implementations across single- and multi-threaded workloads.
Secure gRPC File Watcher
TLS-based gRPC server/client implementation with file-watcher capabilities.
See the complete portfolio at github.com/kmgowda, including SBK examples, secure gRPC samples, developer utilities and algorithm work.
Technical expertise
Architecture
Distributed systems, object storage, streaming storage, software-defined storage, high availability, performance architecture, resiliency and scalability
Platforms
OBS, Pravega, Kafka, Pulsar, HDFS, FoundationDB, NATS, RabbitMQ, Linux and cloud platforms
Storage internals
FAT12/16/32, exFAT, TFAT, TexFAT, F2FS, Ext3, Linux block devices, SATA, SSD, NAND/NOR flash and MMC/SD
Engineering
C, C++, Java, Python, object-oriented, functional and reactive programming, concurrency, algorithms and data structures
Observability
Prometheus, Grafana, Micrometer, InfluxDB, StatsD, latency analysis, throughput modeling and workload benchmarking
Infrastructure
AWS, Google Cloud, gRPC, Netty, TCP/IP, TLS/SSL, Gradle, Make, CMake, Git and Docker
Patents & intellectual property
- US 8,429,331 — Storage optimizations by directory compaction in FAT file system
- US 8,452,734 — FAT file in reserved cluster entry with ready entry state
- US 9,043,286 — Integrated circuit updating file-system metadata with log-record data
- US 9,569,447 — File access method and system thereof
- US 9,817,837 — Method and system for file storage and access
- US 10,976,810 — Sharing input and output devices in networked systems
Books
Design and Implementation of WLAN Authentication and Security
Building secure wireless LAN using EAP-MD5, EAP-TLS and EAP-TTLS protocols. Lambert Academic Publishing, 2010.
View author page →
ExFAT and FAT File Systems Internals
Exploring FAT, exFAT, TFAT and TexFAT file systems. Amazon Digital Services, 2016.
View book →Selected publications & speaking
- Design and Implementation of Storage Benchmark Kit, Lecture Notes in Electrical Engineering, Springer, 2022. DOI
- Distributed Streaming Storage Performance Benchmarking: Kafka and Pravega, IJITEE, 2019.
- Power Fail-Safe FAT File System, Embedded Linux Conference, San Francisco, 2011.
- The Extended FAT File System: Differentiating with FAT32, LinuxCon Europe, Prague, 2011.
- FFSB and IOzone: File System Benchmarking Tools, Features and Internals, Embedded Linux Conference Europe, Barcelona, 2012.
- Research portfolio includes file-system endurance, directory compaction, log-structured allocation, SSD evaluation, transaction safety, geotagging and WLAN authentication.
Education
- PhD, Computer and Information Systems, 2016
- Master of Technology (M.Tech), Computer Science and Engineering, 2004
- Bachelor of Engineering (BE), Computer Science and Engineering, 2001