abn.
abn.is · work

Still building, twenty years in.

Arun Babu Neelicattu — engineering leader & hands-on builder.

Human Interface for Several Confused Computers.

For more than twenty years I've helped teams ship pragmatic software across HPC and AI infrastructure, datacenter networking, developer tooling and platform engineering — most recently as Principal Engineer at Aleph Alpha and interim Head of Engineering at IU. I'm an open-source native: 1,000+ contributions across the ecosystem, lately focused on local-first apps, self-hosted inference on commodity hardware, and the agentic tooling around them. I care about clear communication, inclusive teams, and technology in service of actual value.

Let's talk →
The arc so far

I spliced my DNA with open source at Red Hat — the home of enterprise open source — where I also honed software and product security. At Console Connect I was engineer #1 on the backend — I stood up the on-prem and Google Cloud SRE teams and architected the SDN orchestration for Layer 2/3 networks that still runs the platform today. At CR8DL I helped build HPC/AI infrastructure scaling thousands of GPUs for training and inference — a purpose-built data center, the orchestration across infra and platform, and the customer SaaS on top. At Aleph Alpha, as first principal engineer, I built engineering rigor into the AI and agentic product suite. At IU I led engineering to adopt AI-assisted development without sacrificing the rigor the industry was built on — and left the guardrails to keep it.

18+Tbps
Console Connect's global NaaS (140+ PoPs) still runs on the SDN core I built
−23→+25
engineering-team eNPS at IU, turned around in one engagement
10×
lower monthly AI-infrastructure cost
1,000s
GPUs orchestrated for training & inference
12+
products shaped across infra, platform & AI
Selected experience2010 — present
2020 — Now
Principal Consultant · Fractional Eng LeadershipquadzeroTallinn, EE
Hands-on engineering and fractional technical leadership for startups and enterprises — most recently interim Head of Engineering at IU (International University of Applied Sciences), reviving the team behind its AI-driven teaching; earlier DE-CIX (SDN/gNMI), Aiven (Kafka), Altman Solon.
2025 — 2026
Principal EngineerAleph AlphaBerlin, DE
Technical partner to engineering leadership — architecture, org design and hands-on direction across AI engineering, agentic systems and GenAI products.
2022 — 2024
Principal Engineer → Head of EngineeringCR8DLArizona, US
Joined as principal engineer doing R&D first, then built and scaled the team and stepped up to lead it. Launched the company's first profitable enterprise product on multi-tenant HPC/AI clusters (AMD & NVIDIA, Kubernetes).
2021 — 2022
Head of Engineering, SREElementLondon, UK
Turned a classic ops team into a high-performing SRE unit, halved incident response times and cut cloud operations cost by ~70%.
2018 — 2020
Chief Technology OfficerTwylaBerlin, DE
Led R&D, engineering and ops; grew to 14 engineers and ran NLP services at million-message scale on Kubernetes.
2017 — 2018
Principal ConsultantSECTION6Wellington, NZ
Digital transformation for enterprises — CD pipelines, containers and OpenShift adoption across brownfield and greenfield.
2015 — 2017
Engineer #1 · Distinguished SWEConsole Connect (PCCW)Brisbane, AU
Founding backend engineer. Stood up the on-prem and Google Cloud SRE teams, drove the platform oVirt → Mesos → GKE, and architected the SDN orchestration for Layer 2/3 networks — including Cloud Router, a Fedora-based OSS distro for SDN and network acceleration (DPDK, eBPF).
2012 — 2015
Team Lead, Senior EngineerRed HatBrisbane, AU
Product and software security response, and engineering leadership at the home of enterprise open source — where open source became second nature.
2010 — 2012
Earlier — Agile Digital Engineering · NASDAQ OMX Integrity · Geoscience Australia · Australia
Open source

I'm an open-source native — 1,000+ pull requests across the ecosystem, contributing wherever I can help. Lately that's local-first apps, self-hosted inference on commodity hardware, and packaging projects for Fedora and Flatpak.

Poetry
Maintainer

Dependency management and packaging for Python — builds, publishing and lockfiles, made painless. Now part of millions of developers' daily workflow.

Pythonpython-poetry.orgrepo →
AetherPak
Creator

Self-managed, distributed Flatpak repositories — a hybrid OCI + static-host model that lets any maintainer ship Linux desktop apps without running heavy infrastructure.

Goaetherpak.orgrepo →
Async GraphQL Client

An asynchronous GraphQL client built on AIOHTTP and graphql-core 3.

PythonCreator→
Python gNxI

A friendlier way to consume gNMI protobuf libraries and services from Python.

PythonCreator→
Toolboxa working subset
Languages
PythonGoTypeScriptC/C++JavaRust
Platform & infra
KubernetesTerraformPulumiContainerseBPFCiliumKubeVirt
Cloud
AWSGCPAzureEKSGKEAKSVault
Data & messaging
PostgreSQLRedisKafkaNATSGraphQLgRPCElasticsearch
AI & HPC
LLMsAI AgentsMCPPyTorchGPU ComputeRoCE / RDMAInfiniband
Leadership
Eng ManagementMentorshipTechnical LeadershipStakeholder MgmtIncident Response
Say hello

Let's build something durable.

Two ways to work together — fractional technical leadership, or a full-time seat. Either way, I'm happy to talk shop.

Fractional & technical leadership →
Fractional CTO, principal engineering and R&D through quadzero — for the hard problems you can't staff for.
A full-time role →
A senior engineering or leadership seat where I can go deep and build something for the long term.
✉ hello@abn.isGitHub →LinkedIn →