Forward deployed engineer.
I’m Pavan. I sit inside enterprise IT teams, find the real problem and ship the fix into production. Nine years in IT, now building with AI.
In the video he says: Hi there! I’m a Forward Deployed Engineer. I build AI agents, automate the boring stuff, and keep IT running. Grab a chai, or a coffee. You might be here a while. Let’s dig in.
Most IT problems are not where the ticket says they are. I sit with the team until I find the real one, then build what removes it.
NOC Console
Client engagement102 sites, ~3,500 devices
A read-only network operations console for an enterprise network. It brings Zabbix, FortiAnalyzer, Juniper Mist, Aruba Central, Cisco Meraki, Zscaler and ServiceNow into one screen, with health scores, SLA and MTTR reporting, and an analyst on Amazon Bedrock that answers from the console’s own data.
- ~234,000 Zabbix problems processed a month
- ~17 million events a month
- 6 vendor consoles replaced
In production since September 2026. Every release passes 4,600 automated tests that replay real vendor responses.
Open the live demoITSM Tool
Client engagement~50 network staff
An IT governance platform. ITIL change control with six roles, approvals straight from email, per-device conflict detection and freeze windows. Asset and circuit registers. WAN link requests with ISP feasibility timers.
- Air-gapped RHEL server, one-file offline installer
- SHA-256 verified updates with backup first
- Automatic rollback when a health check fails
I sat with the client’s network and IT teams, chose the stack, designed the workflows and wrote the records the coding agents built to.
Open the live demoWinForge
Open source, MITC# and .NET 8
A golden image used to mean installing Windows by hand, Sysprep, capture, and starting over on any mistake. WinForge builds a deployment-ready Windows 11 ISO offline: an 8-step wizard, a 19-stage pipeline, driver fetch for Dell, HP and Lenovo, a validator and a Hyper-V test boot.
- 3–4 weeks of imaging work, now 3–4 days
- 22,000+ lines of C#
- ~60 checks before the image is committed
Service desk AI
Alcatel-Lucent Enterprise~2,500 users
IT support chatbot. Python on Amazon Bedrock with RAG over knowledge articles and past resolutions. It asks clarifying questions, resolves what the knowledge base covers and otherwise raises a complete ticket.
IT Analyst. A diagnostics agent that reads structured Windows telemetry over a certificate-secured channel and returns a confidence-scored root cause, so the fix ships as a script with no remote session.
- ~350 requests a month resolved without an engineer (estimate)
- 90–115 engineer-hours a month returned to the desk (estimate)
Outlook keeps asking for my password since this morning.
Is it only Outlook, or Teams as well? And are you on the office network or VPN?
Only Outlook. I’m on VPN.
That matches a known fix: your saved credential expired after the password change. I’ve cleared it. Restart Outlook and sign in once.
Still asking.
Then an engineer should look. I’ve raised a ticket with your device, what we tried and the error, so you don’t need to explain it again.
An illustration of the flow. The tools themselves run inside the company network.
Use them yourself.
These are the real front ends, running on invented data for a made-up company, Northwind Logistics. Sign in and click around.
Built for a client organisation, which owns the platform. Shown with permission, using demo data. Open it in a new tab
Sit.
I start beside the people who have the problem: the network team, the service desk, the change board. The requirement comes from watching the work, not from a form.
Scope.
Before code there is a written record: what is known, what is unknown, and every design decision with its reason. Unknown stays unknown until someone answers it.
Build.
AI coding agents build to that record in fixed roles: architect, implementer, reviewer, QA. They hand work over through files. I own the architecture and every decision in it.
Gate.
Nothing ships on trust. Release gates replay recorded vendor responses. They once stopped AI-written code from calling a vendor API endpoint that does not exist.
Run.
I stay after launch. Updates are verified, backed up and rolled back automatically if the health check fails, and client feedback becomes a release within days.
Experience
What I run day to day
Toolkit
Recognition and training
If it annoys me twice, I build a tool.
I can’t leave a hard problem alone. I started by scripting away my own repetitive IT work. Now I sit with the people who have the problem, work out what is really going on, and build whatever it takes. The best part is still the moment something everyone called impossible just works.
“His positive attitude and optimistic outlook created a motivating atmosphere within the team. Very much skilled with PowerShell scripting, server and infra automation and troubleshooting with permanent fixes.”
- Homelab
- A 3-node Proxmox cluster on ZFS, provisioned with Terraform and Ansible, reached through Cloudflare Tunnel with no open ports.
- Automations
- A daily news brief and a Gmail organiser on n8n and local Ollama models: about 150 articles and 120 emails a day at $0 API cost.
- Reading
- Thrillers, mostly. The Silent Patient, The Passengers, A Short Stay in Hell.
- Off duty
- Ghost of Tsushima and Red Dead Redemption 2 on the PS5. Dandeli, the Western Ghats and Sapa when I can get away.
Hiring a forward deployed engineer, or sitting on an IT problem nobody wants? Write to me.
[email protected]Bengaluru, India. Open to forward deployed and applied AI roles.