Her Story
About Ketki
Ketki Haridas is a Senior Performance Platform System Engineer with nearly a decade of experience spanning CPU, system, server, cloud, software, post-silicon, GPU, and database performance engineering. She currently leads the platform performance validation team at Microsoft, where her work centers on the Cobalt ARM-based server processor platform that underpins Azure's cloud infrastructure. In this role, she is responsible for evaluating CPU efficiency and reliability at scale, regularly running and analyzing hundreds of workloads to ensure performance across every layer of the platform. Her career began at Intel, where she spent roughly six years as a performance engineer collaborating closely with Microsoft and Oracle to optimize software for Intel hardware, gaining deep expertise in benchmarking, bottleneck analysis, and cross-functional engineering partnerships.
Prior to her move into the cloud infrastructure space, Ketki built a strong reputation within Intel for developing innovative performance-tuning approaches that were adopted by customer-facing and marketing teams alike, supporting workloads across major cloud platforms including Oracle Cloud Infrastructure, AWS, and Azure. Her technical contributions have had measurable business impact, including a notable improvement of roughly 50 percent in Azure network throughput achieved through targeted debugging and optimization of networking hardware. She holds a bachelor's degree in information technology from the University of Mumbai and a master's degree in computer science from the University of Colorado Denver, earned in 2016, and briefly worked as a lecturer in India, teaching computer science and information technology before transitioning fully into industry.
Outside of her technical achievements, Ketki is a trained classical dancer and singer, bringing an artistic sensibility that complements her analytical career. She remains active in community service, having served for over a decade as a volunteer and organizer with the Vidyalankar Institute of Technology's volunteering committee and as a project leader on a national-level social education initiative in Pune. Motivated by a strong belief in education and mentorship, Ketki is passionate about increasing visibility for performance engineering as a career path and encouraging more women to pursue hardware-focused roles in technology.
Her Interview
Ten minutes with Ketki
01What do you attribute your success to?
I attribute my success to a strong educational foundation, a deep curiosity about computer architecture and how hardware and software interact, and a persistent, problem-solving mindset — all supported by a family that placed high value on education.
02What advice would you give to young women entering your industry?
I would encourage young women entering this industry to build a solid foundation in both software and hardware fundamentals, to explore niche and highly impactful roles like performance engineering, and to pursue STEM careers with confidence, even in spaces where representation is still limited.
03What are the biggest challenges or opportunities in your field right now?
One of the biggest challenges in my field is the low representation of women in hardware and performance engineering roles. At the same time, I see tremendous opportunity in the impact we can create by optimizing hardware-software interactions at cloud scale — from improving system throughput to strengthening reliability for large-scale infrastructure.
04What values are most important to you in your work and personal life?
The values that matter most to me are education, curiosity, independence, and a genuine commitment to mentoring and encouraging others to explore STEM.
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