Reducing Vulnerability Exposure in CI/CD Using AI-Driven Code Scanning and Policy Enforcement

Nilesh Bhandarwar is a Senior Software Engineer at Microsoft, with more than 19 years of industry experience in cloud computing, AI/ML, distributed systems, and cybersecurity. Nilesh has had a strong track record of commitment to innovation, technical excellence, and societal impact through scalable technology solutions in his career. A member of the Microsoft Azure Edge & Platform division, Nilesh is responsible for designing secure, cloud-native platforms and developer productivity tools. His flagship product (Internal Microsoft Security Product) is an AI-powered security governance system that works to automate the security workflow across thousands of repositories, achieving compliance, reducing manual bottlenecks, and helping to save huge cost savings in a year. This innovation significantly accelerated the path to safety, enabling developers to achieve compliance and security milestones in a fraction of the usual time. Nilesh drives cross-functional efforts that span DevOps, cloud infrastructure, and AI-driven automation. He has re-architected legacy systems, built on-demand data pipelines for real-time telemetry, and designed microservices architectures with >99.98% uptime across continents. Outside of engineering Nilesh is an author (scholarly articles published recently in respected platforms like Dzone and Hackernoon) and thought leader and mentor. He works across legal, financial, and security within Microsoft and has managed mission-critical projects for companies such as Starbucks and Premera Blue Cross. He has two master’s degrees in computer science and IT project management, which emphasize his comprehensive technical and leadership experience. Nilesh, in many ways, is the spirit of the TITAN Awards: he combines technical know-how with strategic vision to craft secure, reliable, cutting-edge systems that genuinely measure up to practical business needs and to the highest ideals of ethical engineering.