Lavkesh Dwivedi
Senior Engineering Leader · AI · Cloud · Distributed Systems · Global
I'm Lavkesh. I build and ship cloud-native systems and AI applications across platforms and clouds. Fourteen years in and I still write my own code. That last part matters to me more than the title ever could.
I've led teams across medical imaging, fintech, telecom, federal government, and enterprise platforms. The domains are different but the problems underneath are always the same: how do you build systems that don't fall apart, and how do you build teams that don't burn out. I've been working on both of those my whole career.
I care as much about how a team works as what it ships. Probably more. A team that communicates well and trusts each other will outperform a technically brilliant one that doesn't every single time. I've seen both sides of that. Blissful Bytes is where I share what I've picked up doing this work. No filler, no fluff. Just the stuff I actually had to figure out.
I also think most problems in software engineering are actually people problems wearing a technical disguise. The architecture review that keeps getting pushed. The team that's slower than it should be. The system that nobody wants to touch. Usually you pull on those threads and find something human underneath. That's what makes this work interesting.
Currently: building agentic AI systems and directing a next-gen enterprise commerce platform in the cloud.
Background
Started writing code in 2011 on federal government case management systems. FOIA processing, case management, Section 508 compliance. Not the most glamorous entry point but it was rigorous work and it taught me early that software in the wrong hands at the wrong moment has real consequences for real people. That stuck.
Then I co-founded an IT services company, which was a completely different education. Suddenly I wasn't just the engineer, I was also doing sales, managing cash flow, hiring, firing, and explaining to a client at 11pm why the deployment didn't go as planned. Ran it for about a year and a half. Learned more in that stretch than in most of the years before it.
After that came energy management, then telecom, then healthcare, then fintech. Each domain pushed me into genuinely new territory. Healthcare taught me what reliability actually means when the system is sitting between a clinician and a patient. Telecom taught me distributed systems at scale. Fintech taught me that the blast radius of a bad deployment can be measured in millions. Each one raised the bar on what I expected from myself and from the teams I led.
One thing that's genuinely unusual about my background is the multi-cloud spread. Most engineers go deep on one cloud. I've shipped production systems across Azure, AWS, GCP, and PCF, not by accident but because the work demanded it. That breadth changes how you think about architecture. You stop treating any one platform as the obvious answer and start asking what actually fits the problem.
I went from small-town UP to Hyderabad for grad school, then to the US. The arc from Orai to Dallas has had a lot of interesting stops. I've sat in rooms in every kind of organisation, from federal agencies to startup teams to large enterprises, and the one thing I keep noticing is that the technical problems are almost never the hardest part. I try to bring that perspective into how I build teams and how I approach problems.
Core Skills
- Agentic AI Development & Emerging Technology
- Enterprise Architecture & Technical Strategy
- Engineering Leadership & Governance
- Cloud Infrastructure · Azure, AWS, Microservices
- Prompt Engineering & AI-Native Development
- C# / .NET Core / ASP.NET / Python
- Healthcare IT · DICOM, HL7, Medical Imaging
- Federal Government Systems & Compliance
- Angular / React / TypeScript / VueJS
- SQL Server / NoSQL / Cosmos DB
- Docker / Kubernetes / Terraform / IaC
- Business Development, P&L & Corporate Governance
Roots & Home
I'm from Orai, a small town in Jalaun district, Uttar Pradesh. Bundelkhand through and through, and proud of it. The region has a distinct culture, direct and warm at the same time, and I've carried that with me everywhere I've gone. It probably explains a lot about how I work and how I show up for people.
Growing up in Orai, computers weren't something everyone had. I found my way into them anyway, partly out of curiosity and partly because I was genuinely bad at being bored. That combination of stubbornness and curiosity has been the most useful thing I've brought to my career.
Now I'm in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, which is about as far from Orai as you can get in almost every measurable way. I've made peace with the weather. Mostly. Happily married, equal partner to my better half, raising two boys who are already too clever for their own good. We also have a Shih Tzu, a Pomeranian, and a Persian cat. None of them hold back their opinions. Honestly, neither do I.
Being an immigrant and building a life in a country that wasn't where you started is its own kind of education. You learn to read rooms faster, to translate not just language but context and expectation. You get comfortable with being the person who asks the question everyone else was too polite to ask. That skill has served me well in engineering and in leadership.
Always Learning
I pick up languages the way some people collect hobbies. Not racing any of them. The goal is never fluency on a deadline. It's just the satisfaction of getting a little less lost each time.
There's also Svalbard on my travel list. The kind of place that's more honest about what it is than most places bother to be.
The longer retirement plan is mountains and a snake farm. I know that's not what people expect to hear. I find it entirely logical. Snakes are honest creatures. They don't pretend to be something they're not. I respect that.
I read a lot. History, science, philosophy, fiction. Not for professional development. Just because the world is genuinely interesting and I'd rather understand it better than not. The best ideas I've brought to my work have come from outside of it.
If something on this page resonated, I run free sessions on Topmate for engineers and leaders who want a focused conversation. Career path, architecture, cloud strategy, or just thinking through a specific problem with someone who's been in the room. All free, no strings.
Open to conversations about engineering leadership, architecture, AI systems, and interesting problems worth solving. LinkedIn is the best way to reach me. I'm also on X if you'd rather keep it short.