Arvind Nithrakashyap was born in Coimbatore in 1973, into a middle-class family rooted in Tamil Nadu heritage. His father, born in Mayiladuthurai, was a risk-taker who moved across cities chasing opportunity—from Hyderabad to Chennai—eventually becoming an entrepreneur himself. Arvind’s mother worked in banking, and with both parents busy, his grandmother became a steady emotional pillar in his early years.
Growing up in Chennai, Arvind did not resemble the archetypal tech founder we picture today. He openly describes himself as an introvert—more drawn to books than fields, more comfortable thinking deeply than making noise. His school, Sishya in Chennai, played a monumental role. Unlike conventional schools of that time, Sishya celebrated diversity, extracurriculars, and free thinking. Arvind often says it felt like “a startup of schools”—a place where ideas were allowed to breathe.
Arvind Nithrakashyap: The Turning Point – IIT Madras and the Awakening of a Technologist
While his peers drifted toward regular career paths, Arvind aimed for the most challenging exam in India—the IIT-JEE. In a class of 30, he was the only one preparing. Armed with Brilliant Tutorials’ correspondence course and relentless grit, he secured an All-India Rank of 65.
Choosing IIT Madras was not just natural—it was destiny. Even then, Computer Science was considered unconventional compared to Electrical Engineering. But Arvind trusted his instincts. His only “computer exposure” before IIT was Atari and ZX Spectrum games, yet something in him knew where the world was headed.
Hostel life at IIT-M became his first laboratory of social learning. Limited machines—just eight PCs, three functioning, alongside Sun 360 workstations—forced students to innovate with scarcity. He learned more from peers than professors—building compilers, GUIs, local-language editors, and distributed systems before such terms became mainstream.
This peer-to-peer environment shaped what would later become Rubrik’s engineering philosophy: talent grows faster together.
Graduate School in the U.S.: Discovery Through Discomfort
Arvind received an offer from Infosys after graduation, but he chose further study at the University of Massachusetts Amherst—drawn by its rising reputation in artificial intelligence.
Graduate school, however, revealed a different truth—he was not drawn to academia. Publishing papers and chasing conferences felt limiting. Instead, he gravitated toward hands-on execution—real systems, real users, real scale.
This clarity led him to Oracle—where destiny waited.
Arvind Nithrakashyap: Oracle – The Foundational Years That Built a Future CTO
Arvind joined Oracle through university recruiting, becoming the junior-most engineer in one of the most important product teams in the world—Oracle Database.
For a decade, he wrote C code daily—building the invisible yet essential pillars that power billions of transactions globally:
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Distributed caching systems
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LRU (Least Recently Used) cache optimisation
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Block-size support for enterprise data warehouses
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Storage engine performance, recovery, and scaling
His work helped co-create Oracle Exadata, now the company’s flagship database system. The Exadata milestone alone would be a life legacy for most engineers. For Arvind, it was only the beginning.
He also learned critical truths:
Performance is not the default. Scale is not free. Reliability is an art.
Rocket Fuel and Purisma: Testing Leadership in High-Velocity Worlds
After Oracle, Arvind became Senior Rocket Scientist at Rocket Fuel—building a real-time bidding engine that responded to 50 billion requests per day at under 60 milliseconds. He led 30 engineers, proving that he was not simply a technical genius—he could scale teams, culture, and execution.
At Purisma, he expanded his data-management leadership before the acquisition, further sharpening the entrepreneurial instinct that was already burning within.
The Birth of Rubrik: Where Vision Met Courage
In 2013, everything converged.
Arvind co-founded Rubrik—a company built on a dream larger than product or revenue. Rubrik’s mission was clear:
Protect data with Zero Trust architecture and give businesses cyber resilience against ransomware and breaches.
Arvind was not merely the CTO in title. His role spanned:
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Technology vision
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Product architecture
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Hiring world-class engineering talent
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Supporting sales, customer success, and marketing
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Representing Rubrik globally on keynote stages
Under his leadership, Rubrik became one of the fastest-growing enterprise companies in history—attracting talent from Google, Facebook, and leading Silicon Valley giants.
In April 2024, Rubrik went public on the New York Stock Exchange (NYSE: RBRK). For a boy from Chennai who once only knew Atari games, this moment represented a universe rewritten.