As AI and automation transform businesses, Indian-origin, San Francisco-based engineer Eeshan Agarwal is building the secure, compliant systems that keep enterprise software trusted at scale

As companies race to bolt automation onto every layer of their operations, the systems that decide who and what gets access to enterprise data have quietly become the most consequential layer of modern software. Indian-origin, San Francisco-based engineer Eeshan Agarwal has spent nearly a decade building that infrastructure, designing the systems that keep data secure, compliant and reliable for thousands of organisations worldwide as the shift from annual audits to real-time, automated trust reshapes enterprise technology.

A career built inside the foundations

Agarwal earned a Bachelor of Science in Electrical Engineering and Computer Sciences from the University of California, Berkeley, before spending four years at Box, the publicly traded enterprise content company, where he worked on database, caching and metadata infrastructure powering billions of operations a day. The work was not security focused, and Agarwal is careful to draw that distinction, but it shaped how he thinks about systems at scale. "Infrastructure problems at scale are not just about performance," he says. "They are about correctness, durability, and making systems simple enough for other engineers to use safely."

In 2021, he joined Vanta, a trust management platform now used by more than 16,000 organisations worldwide, as one of its earliest engineers. There he built several of the foundational systems the platform still runs on, including the compliance framework architecture supporting more than 35 regulatory standards, the authorisation and access control systems governing customer data, the identity infrastructure connecting the platform to large enterprise environments, and the billing rails handling complex enterprise contracts. In 2025, he moved into engineering management at the company and today leads its Identity and Access Management and Monetisation organisations.