Vishal Sirohi, Co-Founder and CEO, Island Computing

“Indian engineers have built and operated the world’s largest cloud platforms from inside AWS, Microsoft, and Google. India has shipped at the application layer for two decades. Those engineers are now building the layer beneath it here: the distributed control and data plane, the identity substrate, and the orchestration that turns racks and GPUs into a product a builder consumes. Island Computing runs that platform, fault-tolerant across data centres, engineered from the first commit for multi-tenant SaaS, long-running agentic execution, and regulated AI on Indian data. An Island is up in 90 seconds. A production-grade, fault-resistant application deploys in three minutes.

India’s cloud spend is US$26.4 billion in 2026. Approximately 80% of it flows to foreign operators. The DPDP Act, RBI localisation, SEBI advisories, CERT-In’s six-hour incident-reporting directive, and the MeitY addendum of 20 March 2026 have moved infrastructure decisions from procurement to design. Sovereignty compounds only when the operator owns the code, the underlying hardware infrastructure, the control and data plane, the identity systems, the audit log, and the delivery of the platform, inside Indian jurisdiction.

Sir M. Visvesvaraya’s generation built the dams, waterworks, and railways the economy ran on. This generation is building the substrate it computes on.”

Shrey Malhotra, Co-Founder & Chief Product Officer,CambrianEdge.ai

“AI didn’t make engineering easier this year. It made the wrong parts of it easier, and left the hard part exactly where it always was. Plenty of teams are shipping faster on features that turn out to be the wrong ones. Some are spending their days fixing what a model wrote instead of building anything themselves. The engineers actually pulling ahead are doing something less visible: deciding, before a single line gets generated, whether the thing is worth building at all. No tool teaches you that. On Engineer’s Day, that’s the part of the job worth recognising – not the output, the judgment behind it.”

Vishal Sharai, CTO, CambrianEdge.ai

There’s a new kind of engineer at the frontlines of AI, the forward deployed one. Not in a lab, not on a stage. Inside a client’s chaos, where the data is messy, the workflows are real, and nothing works until someone makes it work. They wire intelligence into rail networks, into the card you swipe, into the answer you get at 2am. And when they do it right, you never notice. It’s just seamless. That’s the paradox of great engineering: the better it is, the more invisible it becomes. This Engineer’s Day belongs to them, the ones fighting where the future is actually being won. Because the greatest code ever written is the code the user never noticed. It just worked.