Kaushal Saraf is a highly accomplished engineer and serves as the Lead Engineer at Atomus. Atomus offers top-notch cybersecurity defenses primarily to those in the aerospace and defense industry, aiming “to prevent the next war.”
Kaushal’s engineering journey began early in his life. When he was in seventh grade, he already had a solid understanding of the fundamentals of coding. A local pharmacy had an outdated billing system.
So, as a proactive problem solver, Kaushal decided to address the pharmacy’s issue. He developed a simple desktop application that streamlined and accelerated the store’s billing system.
A few years later, he and some friends at his undergraduate college were frustrated that they were missing out on many of the intriguing school events and clubs due to the absence of a sound system to inform the students about the start times and locations of the events or clubs.
Therefore, they took matters into their own hands to devise a more effective system and created a popular mobile app called “EventBuzz.” They designed the app to consolidate the numerous student club activities and events in one place.
Nevertheless, they recognized that constructing the app was only the first phase. The subsequent step was to showcase its value to other students. Consequently, they ambitiously registered over 5,000 students across 28 colleges in the nation.
Prior to securing his initial professional engineering role, he once again did what many engineers have not. During his early college days, he and his “team” of two fellow engineers reconstructed an outdated payment and registration system.
The antiquated system was chaotic. Everything was managed in Excel, and there were “thousands” of errors. Faced with the challenge of not being able to easily analyze and filter the data, Kaushal and his team had their work cut out for them.
They developed and designed a web platform that could handle payment and registration for over 15,000 students.
Kaushal went on to achieve other significant accomplishments, including winning the LiftOff List $100K national pitch competition. He was also chosen as one of the 8 engineers of 2020 at the prestigious Viterbi School of Engineering. His numerous achievements earned him a featured article in the Los Angeles Business Journal.
Another noteworthy achievement pertains to his past contracts with the United States Department of Defense. Atomus was granted a $750k contract by the United States Air Force to build advanced cybersecurity technology, and Kaushal was labeled the “Key Technical Personnel.”
All engineers encounter challenges. In fact, that is simply part of the job. Ultimately, all engineers are inherently problem solvers. One of Kaushal’s most significant challenges arose when he and his team were working on one of the projects at Atomus.
They encountered a technical limitation with an existing infrastructure technology. They exhaustively attempted various approaches to address the challenge while working within the constraints of the infrastructure technology.
Kaushal arrived at the realization that the user experience was too constrained despite being considered the industry standard at the time. This posed a problem as their innovative platform would not be able to realize its full potential under such limitations.
Kaushal elaborates: “Being technically driven, this resonated with me and piqued my interest. It compelled me and my team to approach the challenge from the fundamental principles of engineering—the infrastructure and re-architecting basic principles—to overcome the limitations and bring Atomus to fruition.”
So, they worked tirelessly, day and night, to find a solution to the problem. They consulted with experts in the field and delved into research material to address a real-world problem. As anticipated, they succeeded in surpassing the limitations of the existing infrastructure technology, enabling their platform to realize its full potential.
As for Kaushal’s future, he believes that cybersecurity is fundamentally flawed for small businesses. Thus, his mission is to establish a platform that will seamlessly enable businesses to manage their security programs with peace of mind and without incurring exorbitant costs.
Kaushal explains: “I have witnessed firsthand the challenges of running a small business in the rapidly evolving landscape of cyber threats worldwide. These small businesses have no means to protect themselves or to rest easy, given that they already have 999,999 other concerns to worry about, let alone cyber threats. This problem cannot be resolved unless we bring the discourse of innovation, change, and a disruptive mindset to the realm of cybersecurity.”
To other individuals with an engineering mindset, Kaushal has this piece of advice: “If you are passionate about a problem, whether it has been addressed previously or is entirely unprecedented, pursue it!”
