Syed has been designing and deploying networks for over 20 years. In his current role as principal telecommunications architect at Red Hat, Syed provides consultancy services to global 5G customers. Prior to that, Syed worked as a senior solutions architect in the Cisco professional and consulting services organization, providing guidance, strategy, and planning support to various Internet, cloud, and mobile service providers in their adoption of innovating networking technologies and transformation of their networks to new architectures. Syed co-authored one of the first books on NFV and SDN, has been a regular speaker in public forums and conferences, and is recognized as a Cisco Live Distinguished Speaker. Syed is a double CCIE in Service Provider and Data Center technologies (#21617), Google Certified Professional Cloud Networking Engineer, and Certified Kubernetes Administrator (CKA). He holds a bachelor’s degree in engineering from NED University (Pakistan) and a master’s degree in engineering from the University of Florida, Gainesville (USA).