Niraj Tolia
Strategic Advisor
Los Altos, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNiraj Tolia is a serial founder and strategic technology executive with over a decade of experience building and scaling cloud-native, data protection, and AI-first SaaS platforms from early startup to multi‑hundred‑million dollar exits. He co-founded Kasten and Alcion, both acquired by Veeam, and served as Veeam’s CTO where he rearchitected Veeam Data Cloud, grew SaaS ARR materially, and championed AI adoption across the SDLC. A PhD from Carnegie Mellon, he combines deep expertise in distributed systems, storage, and Kubernetes data management with hands-on product and engineering leadership across global teams. Niraj is also active in the open‑source ecosystem—contributing docs and UX improvements to CNCF projects like Kanister and practical site and tooling fixes to Kopia—demonstrating a focus on developer experience and user-facing clarity. He advises startups through 396 Signals, helping translate technical vision into GTM and M&A strategies, and is based in Los Altos, California.
11 years of coding experience
16 years of employment as a software developer
PhD Computer Engineering, PhD Computer Engineering at Carnegie Mellon University
Stackoverflow
541reputation
37kreached
10answers
0questions
Github Skills (24)
restructuredtext10
website-development10
sphinx10
rs10
html10
documentation10
github9
css9
helm9
backup9
go8
deduplication7
encryption7
concurrency6
metric6
Programming languages (9)
Github contributions (5)
kanisterio/kanister
Jan 2018 - Apr 2020
An extensible framework for application-level data management on Kubernetes, Kanister is a Cloud Native Computing Foundation sandbox project and was originally created by the Veeam Kasten team.
Role in this project:
Technical Writer
Technical WriterContributions:35 commits, 10 PRs, 5 pushes in 2 years 2 months
Contributions summary:Niraj primarily contributed to the project by updating and improving the Kanister documentation. Their commits focused on fixing typos, build warnings, adding a favicon, removing trailing whitespace, updating copyright information, and restructuring sections. The user also added Helm instructions and a troubleshooting guide, demonstrating a focus on enhancing user experience and providing clearer guidance for users of the Kanister framework.
golangdata-managementdata-protectionoperatorkubernetes
kopia/kopia
Aug 2019 - Mar 2020
Cross-platform backup tool for Windows, macOS & Linux with fast, incremental backups, client-side end-to-end encryption, compression and data deduplication. CLI and GUI included.
Role in this project:Full-stack Developer
Full-stack DeveloperContributions:5 reviews, 22 commits, 22 PRs in 6 months
Contributions summary:Niraj primarily focused on website updates and minor code adjustments. They made several modifications to the website's content, including text edits, image updates, and the addition of an Asciicinema recording. Additionally, the user addressed a download link issue and made a change to the file logging level.
google-cloud-storagebackupclidata-deduplicationend-to-end
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