Kartik Gautam

I’m a B.Tech CS graduate with hands-on networking and systems programming experience, focused on turning real carrier-grade behavior into testable, debuggable systems. I’ve built from-scratch protocol parsing logic and validated networking protocols in production-like Linux environments.

During my Software Engineering Internship at Ciena India Private Ltd., I worked on Routing/IP validation for MPLS, BGP, and BFD across Linux and PCAP analysis workflows. I designed and automated 50+ Python test cases for network protocol validation (MPLS, BFD, LAG), improving test coverage by 35% and reducing manual verification effort.

I also built debugging and analysis tooling to inspect kernel forwarding tables and PCAP captures, collaborating with senior engineers to isolate critical datapath defects. I validated packet forwarding logic on production Linux systems handling live enterprise traffic, ensuring correctness of routing behavior under real-world conditions.

My projects reflect the same datapath mindset: I built a C++ DPI Engine to parse layered protocol headers and classify encrypted traffic (e.g., TLS SNI extraction) without payload decryption. I’ve also implemented a vector database from scratch in C++ with HNSW + RAG pipeline components and benchmarking for nearest-neighbor search trade-offs, alongside a strong foundation in Data Structures & Algorithms and Linux kernel-level debugging.