Pawan Khandavilli

Garner, North Carolina (USA)
Email: pawan@pawankhandavilli.com
LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/khpawan

Summary

Principal Product Manager with a technical foundation in security and more than a decade of experience building high-consequence platforms across cloud infrastructure, confidential computing, multiparty systems, and mobile payments. I lead product strategy for products that help enterprises act on sensitive data with stronger isolation, explicit trust boundaries, and verifiable controls. My current focus includes the identity, authorization, isolation, and governance foundations required for trustworthy AI agents.

Core strengths

  • Trusted AI infrastructure: agent identity, MCP security, delegated authority, workload isolation
  • Confidential computing: TEEs, attestation, secure cloud architecture, threat modeling
  • Product leadership: strategy, roadmaps, customer discovery, positioning, and platform adoption
  • Cross-functional execution across engineering, design, security, partners, and go-to-market teams
  • High-consequence systems: payments, tokenization, cryptographic services, and secure multiparty platforms

Professional experience

Microsoft — Principal Product Manager

June 2022 – Present

  • Lead product strategy for Confidential Containers on Azure Container Instances (ACI), enabling enterprises to run sensitive container workloads with hardware-backed isolation.
  • Own roadmap direction and translate customer, security, performance, and platform requirements into product priorities.
  • Guide decisions across engineering, design, security, partner, and go-to-market teams to move complex infrastructure capabilities from strategy toward customer adoption.
  • Shape the product narrative around verifiable trust, privacy, and secure execution for cloud and emerging AI workloads.

Fortanix — Senior Product Manager, Confidential Computing

July 2021 – June 2022

  • Owned product requirements, pricing, and competitive positioning for confidential-computing products.
  • Turned customer discovery, market research, and usage insights into product strategy and roadmap decisions.
  • Partnered with engineering, sales, marketing, and support to improve adoption and enterprise customer outcomes.

Royal Bank of Canada — Director, Innovation Security & Technical Program Lead

March 2016 – July 2021

  • Directed development of Virtual Clean Room (VCR), a secure multiparty platform using Intel SGX and confidential computing to support collaboration across organizational trust boundaries.
  • Designed APIs for cryptographic services, key management, and token signing to enable secure integrations.
  • Delivered security architecture for the RBC Wallet and integrated multi-factor authentication for secure payments.
  • Built university research partnerships to explore emerging security and privacy technologies.

Royal Bank of Canada — Senior Manager, Payment & Security Specialist

July 2014 – March 2016

  • Helped launch North America’s first HCE-based mobile wallet, enabling secure contactless payments.
  • Designed Android and iOS libraries for secure storage solutions.
  • Integrated behavioral biometrics and implemented SMS-based MFA.

Bell Identification BV (now Visa) — Software Developer

August 2012 – June 2014

  • Developed EMV payment solutions using hosted card emulation technologies.
  • Built mobile applications (Android, BlackBerry) to support secure transaction experiences.

Education

  • Dalhousie University (Halifax) — Master’s in Computer Science (2009 – 2012)
  • Andhra University (Visakhapatnam) — Bachelor’s in Information Technology (2005 – 2009)

Speaking, writing & patents

  • Speaker on confidential computing and agent security at OC3, Open Source Summit, and Microsoft Azure events.
  • Write about agent identity, MCP security, trustworthy AI infrastructure, and confidential computing at pawankhandavilli.com.
  • Built an open-source MCP + TEE reference implementation exploring hardware isolation for AI tool servers.
  • Published research on RFID systems, role-based access control, and encryption.
  • Granted U.S. patents:
    • US12530683B2 (Jan 2026) — System and method for electronic credential tokenization
    • US12333026B2 (Jun 2025) — System and method for secure electronic transaction platform
    • US12236417B2 (Feb 2025) — System and method for location-based token transaction processing
    • US12210636B2 (Jan 2025) — System and method for multiparty secure computing platform
    • US12192204B2 (Jan 2025) — System and method for storing and distributing consumer information
    • US11934540B2 (Mar 2024) — System and method for multiparty secure computing platform
    • US11868486B2 (Jan 2024) — System and method for secure electronic transaction platform
    • US11700257B2 (Jul 2023) — System and method for storing and distributing consumer information
    • US11354651B2 (Jun 2022) — System and method for location-based token transaction processing
    • US11277412B2 (Mar 2022) — System and method for storing and distributing consumer information

Skills

  • Product strategy, roadmaps, discovery, prioritization, pricing, and positioning
  • Confidential computing, Intel SGX, Azure Confidential Computing, TEEs, and attestation
  • Agent security, MCP, workload identity, delegated authorization, and capability systems
  • Cloud platforms, containers, secure execution, security architecture, and cryptography
  • Enterprise security, privacy, compliance, and cross-functional leadership