Rustam Lalkaka is a product and engineering leader with 14 years of experience building performant, secure, and privacy-forward internet infrastructure at scale. As a former VP of Product at Cloudflare he led teams that shipped high-impact networking and observability products used by billions and measured in hundreds of millions of transactions per second. He’s a repeat founder and CEO (Firetiger, Anapsis) who combines hands-on technical depth—from firmware and data pipelines to distributed systems—with a product instinct honed at startups and large enterprises like Microsoft and Spire Health. Known for shipping commercially successful, technically novel systems (HTTP/3, Magic Transit, iCloud Private Relay integrations), he also has a background in wearable hardware, biosignals analytics, and even ichthyology research—evidence of unusually broad curiosity. Based in San Francisco, he pairs operator-level execution with a track record of turning complex cross-disciplinary requirements into scalable products.
14 years of coding experience
13 years of employment as a software developer
Y Combinator
BA Economics, BA Economics at University of Wisconsin-Madison
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