Hi, I'm Shantanu Mallik.

I'm a Software Systems Engineer who's spent the last several years at the intersection of automation, network validation, and agentic AI. At Ciena, I build the Python-driven platforms and intelligent triage workflows that make complex systems — operating at 1.6 Tbps — verifiable, reliable, and predictable at scale. But the systems I build are only half the story. The other half is the obsessive curiosity that drives me to keep going. I started in SVT and PV engineering — writing test frameworks, debugging protocol behavior, chasing down the exact failure condition in a 400-node fabric — and somewhere along the way became fascinated with what happens when you let language models reason about those failures instead of humans. So I built that too. When I'm away from the terminal, I'm usually somewhere in the mountains. Hiking resets my brain in a way that nothing else does — there's something clarifying about problems with a single, obvious goal: get to the top. I also play guitar, badly enough that it stays humbling and good enough that I keep at it. Both feel like debugging with better scenery. I believe the most interesting work lives at the boundary between what's well-understood and what isn't. That's where I try to spend my time — whether I'm designing a failure-triage agent, tracing a packet through a broken pipeline, or figuring out why a chord progression doesn't resolve the way I expected. If you're building something at that edge — or you're curious about the intersection of systems engineering and AI — I'd genuinely love to talk. Or check out what I do when I'm not at a terminal.