About Me

I'm Mehrdad Abdolghafari — Principal Cloud Engineer at Royal Bank of Canada (RBC), where I lead the Azure, AI and Kubernetes platforms. I'm a Microsoft MVP in Azure and a speaker at Microsoft Ignite.

What I Do at RBC

I lead the design and engineering of the Azure Kubernetes Platform at RBC, ensuring secure and smart infrastructure for hundreds of application teams. I drive the design and operation of large-scale, secure, and compliant Azure and Kubernetes environments with a focus on automation, GitOps, and platform reliability to enable developer self-service and innovation at enterprise scale.

My background in cloud, Kubernetes and software engineering empowered me to lead the world-class Azure and AKS infrastructure in RBC — leveraging a mix of Azure and Kubernetes concepts and best practices in self-service solutions at enterprise scale.

Speaking & Community

I presented at Microsoft Ignite on "Fast and flexible inference on open-source AI models at scale" — covering how to run open-source AI models from local environments to cloud deployments using Azure Container Apps, serverless GPUs, and AKS for scalable, high-performance LLM operations.

I played a pivotal role in helping RBC become #1 in Canada and top 3 globally in AI maturity among banks.

Focus Areas

• Agentic AI — Designing autonomous AI systems, LLM inference at scale, and AI platform architecture
• Cloud Platform — Azure architecture, cloud-native solutions, hybrid infrastructure, and platform engineering
• Kubernetes — AKS at enterprise scale, GitOps, operator patterns, GPU scheduling, and developer self-service

Patent

Technology Focus

Azure Kubernetes and Open Source — with roles spanning Developer, Researcher, Trainer, and Content Creator.