Nikhil Bhatia
Director Of Engineering at Confluent
Bellevue, Washington, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNikhil Bhatia is a Director of Engineering with over 20 years of experience building large-scale distributed systems, currently leading engineering at Confluent after a long tenure at Microsoft working across Azure Compute, Bing, and OS compatibility. He combines hands-on backend expertise—evidenced by contributions to high-profile open-source projects like Gatekeeper (OPA policy controller) and Azure AAD pod identity—with strategic leadership for data and event-processing platforms. Known for pragmatic refactoring and robust dependency management, he focuses on reliable policy enforcement, admission control, and audit capabilities in cloud-native environments. Based in Bellevue, WA, he pairs an electrical engineering foundation from IIT Roorkee and USC with deep production experience in containers, VMs, and cloud identity. Colleagues describe him as a technical leader who still dives into code to solve thorny integration issues and improve developer tooling.
10 years of coding experience
15 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (M.S.) Electrical Engineering, Master of Science (M.S.) Electrical Engineering at University of Southern CaliforniaIndian Institute of Technology Roorkee
Github Skills (18)
kubernetes10
gpo10
controller10
protocol-buffers10
domain-controller10
policies10
rule-engine10
security10
go10
kubernetes-pods10
azure-active-directory9
dependency-management9
json9
apidoc9
rest9
Programming languages (7)
Github contributions (5)
Azure/aad-pod-identity
Apr 2018 - Sep 2018
[DEPRECATED] Assign Azure Active Directory Identities to Kubernetes applications.
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:100 commits, 10 PRs, 8 pushes in 4 months
Contributions summary:Nikhil appears to be involved in dependency management and code refactoring within the `azure/aad-pod-identity` repository. The commits show efforts to "vendot the deps," which likely refers to managing and updating project dependencies. This suggests a focus on maintaining the project's build environment. The presence of protocol buffer related files points towards contributions in the core functionality of the project.
active-directoryazure-active-directorykubernetes-applicationsaad-pod-identitykubernetes
open-policy-agent/gatekeeper
Oct 2018 - Jan 2019
🐊 Gatekeeper - Policy Controller for Kubernetes
Role in this project:Backend Engineer
Backend EngineerContributions:15 commits, 36 PRs, 25 pushes in 2 months
Contributions summary:Nikhil primarily focused on developing the backend functionality of the Gatekeeper project, specifically related to policy enforcement using OPA. Their contributions included the implementation of the validation and mutation admission controller endpoints and audit features. They also refactored the code to aggregate patch responses and integrated a single audit endpoint. In addition, they were involved in demo tools and endpoint updates.
golanggatekeeperpolicycontrolleropa
Find and Hire Top DevelopersWe’ve analyzed the programming source code of over 60 million software developers on GitHub and scored them by 50,000 skills. Sign-up on Prog,AI to search for software developers.