NOMINATION HIGHLIGHTS

Karthikeyan Thirumalaisamy is a distinguished cybersecurity leader and Principal Software Engineer at Microsoft. He has over 18 years of experience in building large-scale software systems across various domains including security, finance, fitness, and more. His broad expertise spans cloud architecture, secure software engineering, and advanced security platforms. For the last decade, he has designed and delivered Microsoft’s secure software supply chain platform, which is now the trusted foundation for most Microsoft products across Azure, Office, and Windows ecosystems. Under his architectural leadership systems were established to ensure secure code delivery and preserve integrity throughout the build and deployment pipeline, for products that are used globally.

One of his key accomplishments was building a security solution to automatically detect and mitigate compromised cloud environments, enabling faster, automated responses to emerging threats and minimizing potential impact without manual intervention. He also created a large-scale security platform capable of processing over 1 billion requests every day with low latency and high availability. In addition, he led a complete redesign of Microsoft’s supply chain security service into a cloud-native containers-based architecture that delivered a 50% reduction in operational costs over $2 million annually while significantly improving the performance, scalability, and incident response capabilities. These improvements translated into a decrease in security incidents, automated remediation, and saved valuable engineering hours across support and operational teams.

He has made a critical impact within Microsoft’s supply chain security division and is an emerging thought leader in new security domains. He has authored numerous peer-reviewed security papers on topics such as Cloud Native Security and Confidential Computing and has been instrumental in promoting the adoption of these concepts horizontally across multiple Microsoft divisions, directly influencing the organization’s secure development and trusted execution methodologies. He is than a technical leader, Karthikeyan is a mentor, collaborator, and advocate for a security-first engineering culture. He has led cross-team initiatives to integrate security-by-design principles, mentored early-career security engineers, and provided strategic direction to executive stakeholders.

Recently, he has expanded his innovation leadership to container security using Generative AI and published a research paper on using Generative AI for proactive detection and remediation of zero-day vulnerabilities. Other than his technical contributions, he is committed to sharing his knowledge back to the cybersecurity community through publishing to enable learning and advancement for the industry.

Papers:
https://www.ijsr.net/getabstract.php?paperid=SR25603123105
https://www.ijsr.net/getabstract.php?paperid=SR25521125124
Linkedin:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/karthikeyan-thirumalaisamy/