Over 20 years in networking & communications, Saurav has worked on systems as diverse as network virtualization at Big Switch Networks, datacenter switches at Arista, and WDM optics at Enablence. He currently serves as VP of Engineering at the Open Networking Foundation, where he leads the development and production-deployment of solutions like Aether,  SD-RAN, and  VOLTHA  in collaboration with network operators like Deutsche Telekom, Comcast, AT&T and other partners. Leveraging Aether’s success, he co-founded Ananki, a startup providing private-5G solutions for smart enterprises.

He was also part of the original team at Stanford that made SDN popular. His pioneering research on SDN in WANs proposed, demonstrated and analyzed a converged IP/MPLS/Optical WAN architecturally based on SDN and OpenFlow. He holds an MS from the University of Arizona and a PhD in Electrical Engineering from Stanford University.