For our readers- who is Rohit Yadav?
I’m Rohit Yadav, CTO at ShapeBlue and a long-time contributor to the open source cloud orchestration project Apache CloudStack as a committer and PMC member.
In the open source community, over the years, I’ve held various roles including the VP of the CloudStack project and release manager of several LTS releases, and I was also elected a member of the Apache Software Foundation and member of the Kubernetes project.
My background spans virtualisation, networking, storage, distributed systems, orchestration and cloud infrastructure — what started as a volunteer role at CERN in 2010 has grown into a full-time career in open-source cloud.
How does ShapeBlue contribute to Apache CloudStack’s future roadmap?
At ShapeBlue we have a multi-pronged approach to supporting the CloudStack project’s future: we pride ourselves as “the CloudStack Company”, with an employee-owned business model that aligns perfectly with the open source project and community. We are one of the largest active contributors to CloudStack, with numerous committers and PMC members and invest in upstream feature development by identifying gaps, building features and contributing them back.
In short – we don’t just contribute to CloudStack – we help shape and evolve it. That means contributing features, improvements and fixes, shaping discussions, engaging with the community and aligning our internal innovation (at ShapeBlue) with the future direction of the project.
What’s your approach to building and retaining a high-calibre engineering team?
Building and retaining our engineering team comes down to three foundational pillars: talent, culture, and growth. I look for engineers who are technically strong, curious, proactive, comfortable with complexity and willing to learn. When building a team, I aim to create an environment of autonomy, trust and continuous improvement where engineers can make an impact, propose ideas and see their work matter.
In practice this means clear goals, frequent check-ins, giving people responsibility (not just tasks), recognising their contributions, and connecting them to the bigger mission (why we build, what we support). Further, hiring smart, motivated and adaptable raw talent makes our work easier.
How do you effectively lead a geographically dispersed team working across multiple time zones?
My approach is structured around communication, clarity and ownership. We use asynchronous tools (e.g., email, slack, Github, JIRA/Confluence etc.) so that hand-offs can happen smoothly even when people are offline, but also structure synchronous communication (e.g. stand up calls, scheduled meetings etc.). I also make sure tasks, responsibilities and timelines are clearly documented.
At ShapeBlue we encourage local autonomy so work can progress without constant meetings (instead of daily stand ups, we do twice weekly for example). We work on building trust and ownership. By building these practices consistently, a geographically dispersed engineering organisation becomes an asset rather than a burden.
What would you say is the secret behind ShapeBlue’s smooth internal processes?
The “secret” is less a singular trick and more a set of cultural and structural practices. We have a open-source mindset – we naturally cultivate transparency, collaboration and documentation. We also find very important engineering discipline by emphasising engineering best-practices (CI/CD, QA automation). In addition we are maximising autonomy and feedback loops. At ShapeBlue we are 100% employee-owned which aligns incentives: everyone feels they are a stakeholder in the company’s success and internal processes are built with respect and trust.
When hiring engineers, what qualities or attributes do you consider most important?
When assessing candidates, the attributes I weigh most heavily include technical competence and problem-solving ability. We give our candidate a simple problem that introduces them to CloudStack and through that we understand how well the candidate work through complexity, understand edge-cases, systems.
In addition we look for curiosity and growth mindset. Technology evolves fast. I prefer someone who asks “why” and “what if” rather than just someone who only executes. Additional criteria are ownership and accountability, collaborative attitude and communication, being a cultural fit and purpose alignment. Adaptability and resilience are also important.
What are the most common challenges in managing highly technical professionals?
Managing highly technical engineers involves ensuring alignment between technical work and business value by guiding teams toward outcomes; avoiding over-engineering by balancing elegant solutions with practical needs; keeping motivation high when work becomes routine through role-crafting, rotation, innovation projects and occasional controlled “chaos”; managing domain-expertise silos through knowledge sharing, documentation, peer review, mentoring and maintaining a skills matrix to avoid bottlenecks; communicating clearly by translating between technical detail and stakeholder expectations; and preventing burnout through balanced workloads, skill-building and rotating responsibilities.
By recognising these challenges and addressing them with strong structural and cultural practices, we create an environment where highly technical teams can stay aligned, motivated, resilient and effective.
Outside of work, what passions or hobbies occupy your time?
When I’m not working or spending time with my family, I like to learn new thing, experiment with and on my CloudStack based homelab, building and tinkering around projects (I’m almost done finishing a 8-bit breadboard computer which started three years ago), and explore new and creative ideas (anything from grounding my own spice and flour, pressing my own seed-oil, growing our fruits and vegetables, to DIY investing and learning about financial markets, to maintaining our home-solar panels grid, and playing music instruments such as Indian bamboo flute – the Bansuri).
Antonia is a dedicated Marketing Assistant who genuinely enjoys her work. Since joining the team, she has been actively involved in the marketing activities.
In her spare time, Antonia enjoys spending time with her family and discovering new places.
