1. Simon Rizkalla, Vice President Customer Advocacy APJ, New Relic 

Sustainability deserves to be as central to engineering conversations as innovation is. At New Relic, we’ve long believed operational excellence and sustainability should go hand in hand, which is why our engineering team practices GreenOps. Through this approach, our team optimises infrastructure efficiency to maximize performance, while reducing the environmental footprint of our workloads.

We committed to this early. In 2023, New Relic set a formal goal to reach net-zero emissions by 2030, backed by targets approved by the Science Based Targets initiative. One of the first places we looked was our own cloud footprint, since infrastructure made up nearly half our total emissions at the time. We migrated our largest workloads from on-premises data centers onto AWS Graviton-based instances, cutting emissions from those migrated workloads by 37%. 

The next frontier, for us and for engineering teams everywhere, is doing the same for AI. As AI becomes inseparable from how Indian engineering teams build software, using compute mindfully is becoming an engineering responsibility––intelligent observability is helping us achieve that. For example, an AI agent might take 15 model calls to complete a task that could have been done in four. Without observability, that looks like ordinary “AI usage.” However, with intelligent observability, teams can trace exactly where the extra calls are happening, understand why, and redesign the workflow, cutting cost and compute at the same time. These small steps are what lead to big, sustainable strides.

Building AI responsibly and sustainably are one in the same. On a day meant to celebrate what engineers build, it’s worth remembering how efficiently they build it, too.

2. Abhilash Shetty, Vice President & Head of Engineering & AI, Visionet

Engineering is a mindset, one driven by curiosity, a willingness to challenge convention, and a relentless pursuit of better ways to solve problems. As AI and emerging technologies reshape how we build new age systems, transform business processes, and create value, the role of engineers continues to evolve. Yet, what remains timeless is the ability to think critically, adapt, solve complex problems, and turn ideas into meaningful outcomes. With AI democratizing knowledge and expertise, the engineer’s role is evolving: from finding answers to framing better questions, challenging convention, and turning insight into impact. 

This Engineers’ Day, we at Visionet celebrate the engineers shaping our AI-Native journey, turning complexity into opportunity, challenges into possibilities, and ideas into impact.

3. Praveer Kochhar, Co-Founder & CPO, KOGO AI 

National Engineer Day for me is about the realities nobody sees until it breaks. This year’s theme: smart engineering for a sustainable future through innovation and digitalization, is a call to build systems that scale without multiplying waste, whether that’s compute, tooling or human effort.

At KOGO AI, this shows up as a design constraint because every enterprise we work with is running 10 or more disconnected AI tools by the time they call us. This means separate systems for retrieval, evaluation, observability and governance and each of them has its own infrastructure footprint. Consolidating that into one operating layer is cleaner engineering because it cuts redundant compute, integration work and risk. When people think of sustainability in AI they immediately think of the carbon footprint and that matters but it is also about not rebuilding the same governance and audit logic five times for five different agents. 

In addition, digitalization means nothing without ownership. An enterprise that digitizes its workflows with AI agents but is outsourcing its process IP to the third party is only renting their own assets. Good engineering means giving organizations the control plane to own that IP on-prem with an audit trail to prove when regulators come knocking on the door. 

It’s obviously not glamorous work because it involves RBAC tables, drift monitoring, connector maintenance and more. But that’s what smart engineering for a sustainable future looks like in practice—fewer moving parts, less duplicated infrastructure and AI systems that get more capable over time. On that note, Happy National Engineers Day to everyone doing that essential work.