Cisco Access Registrar

Member Technical Staff
Jul 2005 – Sep 2007

At the beginning of my professional journey, I had the opportunity to contribute to Cisco Access Registrar, a high-performance AAA (Authentication, Authorization, and Accounting) server deployed at large-scale Internet Service Providers. Working on a product that served critical infrastructure exposed me to distributed systems, performance tuning, and protocol implementations at scale — experiences that shaped my engineering discipline early on.

I was responsible for developing, owning, and sustaining key components of the server architecture, which was built in C++ for Solaris and Linux platforms. The solution also included a lightweight Java-based web interface leveraging JSP, Servlets, and JNI for seamless interaction with native libraries. This allowed us to balance performance with usability in complex deployment environments.

Key contributions:

  • Designed and enhanced core features such as the backing store threading model and EAP protocols, improving scalability and resilience.
  • Resolved over 100 critical issues across modules like EAP, Backing Store, Session Manager, SNMP, and Packet Processing, contributing to the stability of customer deployments.
  • Handled 60+ customer escalations, diagnosing issues in production environments and delivering timely resolutions.
  • Participated in onboarding, mentoring, and interviewing, helping build a robust team culture and knowledge-sharing practices.

Technologies used:

C++, Core Java, JSP, Linux, Make build systems, Tomcat Web Server, JNI