Kailash Nadh

About

Dr. Kailash Nadh is an Indian software developer, open-source advocate, and the Chief Technology Officer (CTO) of Zerodha, India's largest retail stockbroker. Born in Allahabad and raised in Kerala, Nadh developed a deep fascination with electronics and programming during his adolescence. He pursued higher education at Middlesex University in London, earning a Bachelor of Science in Computer Science followed by a PhD in Artificial Intelligence and Computational Linguistics. In 2013, Nadh joined Zerodha to establish and lead its in-house technology team. Under his technical leadership, the company built its highly scalable trading platform, Kite, from scratch. Nadh is widely recognized for scaling Zerodha's infrastructure using an exceptionally lean engineering team and prioritizing self-hosted, free, and open-source software (FOSS) over proprietary vendor architectures. Aside from his corporate role, Nadh is an active contributor to the global software commons, having created listmonk, a widely adopted self-hosted mailing list manager. He actively fosters the developer ecosystem in India as a co-founder of the FOSS United Foundation and spearheads Zerodha's FLOSS/fund, a million-dollar global initiative supporting open-source software sustainability.

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