# Saad Malik

> Saad Malik is the CTO and co-founder of Spectro Cloud, a San Jose infrastructure software company founded in 2019. A longtime engineer who worked at Cisco and CliQr, Malik has moved from writing code himself to leading engineering, product, and operations teams while shaping Spectro Cloud's expansion from Kubernetes management into edge and production AI infrastructure.

- **Role:** CTO and Co-Founder at Spectro Cloud
- **Organizations:** Spectro Cloud, Cisco, CliQr Technologies, Cisco Systems
- **Education:** BS, Computer Science, San Jose State University
- **Known for:** Co-founded Spectro Cloud in 2019 and helped develop its Kubernetes management platform, Palette., Helped grow Spectro Cloud from three founders to a global company with hundreds of employees., Led technology direction spanning Kubernetes, virtual machines, edge computing, GPU infrastructure, and AI inference.

## Career timeline

- **2005-2013** — Worked as a senior software engineer at Cisco Systems.
- **2013-2016** — Held engineering and solutions architecture leadership roles at CliQr Technologies.
- **2016** — Joined Cisco after its acquisition of CliQr.
- **2016-2019** — Served as a director of engineering at Cisco.
- **2019** — Co-founded Spectro Cloud with Tenry Fu and Gautam Joshi and became CTO.
- **2024** — Spectro Cloud raised a $75 million Series C led by Growth Equity at Goldman Sachs Alternatives.
- **2025** — Spoke publicly about moving from hands-on coding to leading nearly 300 people across engineering, product, and operations.
- **2026** — Spectro Cloud raised more than $100 million in Series D funding and expanded its production AI infrastructure work.

## Achievements

- Co-founded Spectro Cloud in 2019 and helped develop its Kubernetes management platform, Palette.
- Helped grow Spectro Cloud from three founders to a global company with hundreds of employees.
- Led technology direction spanning Kubernetes, virtual machines, edge computing, GPU infrastructure, and AI inference.
- Built and shipped enterprise, service-provider, and consumer technology products across a career of roughly two decades.
- Helped establish an internal cross-functional AI task force to set usage, data-sharing, and security guidelines.

## Latest updates

- **2026-09** — Spoke with AMD executive Kumaran Siva at AI Infra Summit about model routing, token costs, metering, quotas, and policy controls.
- **2026-07** — Published a series of articles on AI agents as production workloads, token governance, and local-first inference.
- **2026-07** — Spectro Cloud announced more than $100 million in Series D funding to accelerate production AI adoption.
- **2025-11** — Presented lessons on deploying AI at the edge at KubeCon + CloudNativeCon Edge Day in Atlanta.
- **2025-10** — Published a personal reflection on evolving from a hands-on engineer into a CTO leading engineering, product, and operations.

## Links

- Website: https://www.spectrocloud.com/blogs/author/saad-malik
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/saad-a-malik
- GitHub: https://github.com/saamalik

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/saad-malik
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-27