Kaushal Saraf is a senior engineer, systems thinker, and mission-driven technologist who is redefining how cybersecurity is delivered to small and midsize businesses.
From building his first app in seventh grade to helping architect secure platforms for institutions like Goldman Sachs and the U.S. Air Force, Kaushal has always been driven by a belief in technology’s power to solve real-world problems—especially for those overlooked by traditional enterprise tools.
At Atomus, a cybersecurity and compliance platform purpose-built for SMBs and defense contractors, Kaushal plays a critical engineering role on the team—driving the design, scale, and resilience of the company’s most advanced systems. His focus is making enterprise-grade protection accessible, contextual, and easy to deploy.
His mindset is one of systems-level innovation: reimagining broken industry models, simplifying complexity through intelligent engineering, and embedding trust and automation into every layer of infrastructure.
Over the past six years, Kaushal has led the technical charge on some of the company’s most ambitious projects—from protocol interoperability and telemetry pipelines to the design of a context-aware security data warehouse used by over 100 companies across the Defense Industrial Base.
Kaushal’s engineering philosophy is rooted in real-world experience: hackathons, high-stakes government contracts, and hundreds of hours with end users in the field. What sets him apart isn’t just technical depth—it’s the ability to design scalable systems that work for the people who depend on them, especially those who lack access to security teams or deep technical expertise.
IMAHE: KAUSHAL SARAF
Q&A With Kaushal Saraf, Senior Engineer At Atomus
1. What initially drew you to technology, and how has your motivation evolved since building your first app in seventh grade?
I started building because I wanted to fix problems I was personally facing. My first app was a simple tool I needed—nothing fancy—but it gave me a sense of agency that stuck. I realized that code could turn ideas into products, and products into impact.
Today, I view engineering less as personal expression and more as systemic problem-solving. I’m focused on building platforms that remove complexity, especially for users who shouldn’t have to understand cybersecurity at a deep level—like entrepreneurs, compliance leads, or small IT teams.
What drives me now is the opportunity to take what’s normally opaque, expensive, or fragmented—and make it usable, unified, and accessible. I’ve seen how much small and midsize businesses are underserved in cybersecurity, and I want to be part of changing that permanently.
2. You’ve emphasized mindset as a critical tool in overcoming engineering challenges—can you share a specific moment when your mindset made all the difference?
For a long time, I was optimizing for technical perfection—how to build better alerting, tighter compliance controls, smarter agents. But over time, I realized that the real blockers weren’t just technical—they were systemic.
The industry is built on selling fragmented tools that don’t talk to each other. Companies end up buying “solutions” they don’t have the time or resources to integrate. That made me ask: What if we designed the platform based on how people use security, not how vendors sell it?
That was the mindset shift: stop trying to improve broken workflows—reimagine them.
That’s how the idea of a Context-Aware Security Data Warehouse was born. Instead of bolting together disparate components, we designed a system that collects, correlates, and acts on signals in context—compliance data, user behavior, configurations, asset health—so the system can make intelligent, real-time decisions. It wasn’t just a new architecture—it was a new mental model.
3. At Atomus, you faced limitations with legacy infrastructure—how did you and your team approach re-engineering it, and what key lessons did you take from that experience?
The original state of the infrastructure was what I’d call “functionally disconnected.” Identity systems, endpoint logs, cloud policies, OT telemetry—all existed in isolation. There was no shared schema, no protocol for communication, and no unified operational model.
The first thing we did was define data coordination protocols that allowed these systems to speak the same language. Then we built a data warehouse that could ingest raw telemetry from every system, normalize it, and apply a behavioral context.
From an engineering standpoint, that meant:
- Decoupling ingestion from analysis
- Building fault-tolerant, stateless pipelines
- Defining a schema that maps both technical and compliance semantics
The biggest lesson? Scalability isn’t about throughput—it’s about coherence. You can’t scale a system that doesn’t know how its parts relate to one another. We didn’t centralize—we created distributed intelligence. That’s what made it work at scale.
4. You’ve worked on systems used by thousands—from student apps to platforms for Goldman Sachs and even the U.S. Air Force—how do you approach building scalable, secure, and reliable systems across such different environments?
Every system I build starts with the same three principles:
- Understand the intent—What problem are we solving, and what does success look like?
- Map the data flow—Where does data come from, where does it go, and who depends on it?
- Define your constraints—What can’t fail, and what’s the cost of failure?
At Atomus, we handle telemetry and security data from over a hundred businesses across highly regulated industries. So we had to build a multi-tenant, highly available platform with:
- Policy enforcement at the edge
- Dynamic rule evaluation
- Cloud-agnostic data orchestration
I borrow a lot from domain-driven design: isolate bounded contexts, create shared language, and build modular systems that can evolve independently. And I’m obsessive about reliability. That means engineering for:
- Zero-trust by default
- Eventual consistency where needed
- Clear observability across all components
Whether you’re defending satellites or dental offices, the architecture must flex without breaking. That’s the engineering challenge—and the fun part.
5. Small and midsize businesses are often left behind in cybersecurity—how is Atomus helping change that, and what role does accessibility play in your engineering decisions?
SMBs don’t have SOC teams, compliance departments, or budgets for consultants. But they still face ransomware, insider threats, and audit requirements. That disconnect is what we’re fixing.
We’ve built a platform where a business owner can come in, say “I need to be CMMC Level 2 compliant,” and within hours:
- We deploy agents across their systems
- Configure real-time monitoring and enforcement policies
- Begin logging evidence for future audits
Behind the scenes, this requires deep engineering:
- Composable policy engines
- Pre-approved infrastructure baselines
- Declarative compliance orchestration
We engineer accessibility not just in UI, but in architecture. Every alert, configuration, or change must be:
- Traceable
- Explainable
- Verifiable
We want security to be intelligent by design, not labor-intensive by default. That’s what it means to make security accessible.
6. What inspired you to focus your efforts on empowering entrepreneurs with affordable, effective security solutions—and what can we expect from the platform you envision?
I’ve seen brilliant people—especially in defense and deep-tech—build amazing things, only to struggle with securing them. Not because they didn’t care, but because the tooling was built for big enterprises, not them.
That inspired me to build systems that support the builders, not just the big guys. Atomus is the manifestation of that vision. A platform that:
- Learns from its environment
- Closes compliance gaps automatically
- Advises and acts like a virtual security team
We now support over 100+ organizations across the Defense Industrial Base. We help them pass audits, detect insider threats, share classified data, and operate with confidence.
Next, we’re engineering AI-native co-pilots—intelligent agents that act like embedded CISOs and compliance leads, responding in real time to threats, misconfigurations, and audit gaps.
We’re not building a security tool. We’re building the security operating system for the modern business.
7. From hackathons to high-stakes contracts, your career has been shaped by constant learning—what habits or practices have helped you stay ahead of the curve in such a fast-moving field?
I treat learning like an engineering function. It’s not passive—it’s proactive, iterative, and documented.
Here are a few key practices:
- Architecture journaling: Every major decision I make gets logged with rationale, assumptions, and tradeoffs.
- Rapid prototyping: I build MVPs in sandboxes to test new designs or frameworks.
- Reverse-engineering failures: I study breach reports and red-team exercises and walk backward to map systemic weaknesses.
- Customer immersion: I spend time in the field, listening to what frustrates users—not just what the metrics show.
I also maintain an internal research cadence—studying new frameworks, threat actor trends, and policy changes. And most importantly, I build alongside people who value feedback over hierarchy. That’s where the real learning happens.
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