Arjun Murthy
Head of AI and Software | Defence Electro-Optics
I am the Head of AI and Software at Optimized Electrotech Pvt Ltd, a defence electro-optics company, where I own the AI and Software division: its charter, competitive strategy, multi-year roadmap, program and cost stewardship, organisation-building and talent, an AS9100 compliant quality and SDLC governance model, and a 15-member multi-disciplinary team across Testing, Full-stack, AI, and the Embedded and Application layer.
I run the Software and AI division with full ownership of strategy, people, delivery and quality. I am accountable for a config-driven, single-codebase, multi-product EO/IR portfolio: multispectral LWIR / MWIR / SWIR / NIR / VIS imaging, multi-sensor and image fusion, real-time AI detection and multi-object tracking, gimbal and line-of-sight stabilization with AHRS and laser-range-finder integration and target geolocation, and electro-optical systems for ISR, counter-UAS / anti-drone and missile-seeker programs - deployed on edge AI accelerators and FPGA.
My competitive strategy is explicit. The EO/IR hardware and edge-AI boards are how we get in the door and onto the platform - the market-entry wedge. The durable, compounding moat is what I own and build: the AI detection and tracking IP, the curated proprietary defence datasets, the config-driven software platform, and the accumulated mission-domain experience. That software-and-data advantage is the real barrier to entry.
Over more than a decade I have grown from hands-on engineering into division leadership, owning technology direction, product strategy, customer and external-stakeholder engagement, and cross-functional delivery for mission-critical AI products. I am targeting General Management, Director and VP roles in Software and AI. I am PMP certified and an IIM Ahmedabad (IIMA) alumnus through its Executive General Management Programme, and I hold an M.Tech in Communication Systems. I care deeply about building Make-in-India defence technology that is fast, reliable and field-proven.
personal info
- Set product and technical strategy for a config-driven, single-codebase, multi-product EO/IR platform: multispectral LWIR / MWIR / SWIR / NIR / VIS imaging, multi-sensor and image fusion, AI detection and multi-object tracking.
- Own real-time computer-vision direction: sub-20ms end-to-end and sub-5ms AI-only tracking, accountable for Pd / Pfa performance.
- Own the AI and data moat: LLM and SLM fine-tuning, orchestration, RAG, Agentic AI, and the curated proprietary defence dataset pipeline.
- Direct hardware-aware edge AI on NXP i.MX 8, AMD Xilinx FPGA, Kinara Ara-2 and Hailo, with ONNX / OpenCV pipelines, for ISR, counter-UAS / anti-drone and missile-seeker programs.
- Build production-ready engineering: AS9100-compliant QMS, SDLC governance, CI/CD and test automation across parallel release trains.
- Own customer, defence-roadshow and Make-in-India engagement including the iDEX / ADITI program.
- Frame the competitive strategy: hardware is the market-entry wedge; software, AI and proprietary data are the durable barrier to entry.
- Advancing multispectral EO/IR detection, multi-sensor and image fusion, and AI multi-object tracking with extreme low-latency pipelines on edge accelerators and FPGA.
- Compounding the moat: curated proprietary defence datasets, the config-driven software platform, and LLM / Agentic decision support for border and ISR.
- Maturing AS9100 QMS, SDLC governance, CI/CD and test automation so the platform scales predictably across parallel release trains.
- Scaling the 15-member division and its leadership bench for multi-program delivery.
- Today I formally own the AI and Software division at Optimized Electrotech: competitive strategy, a 15-member multi-disciplinary team, AS9100 quality and SDLC governance, operations management and product sizing for defence EO/IR programmes.
- Since 2020, ahead of formal division ownership, I led as a Centre-of-Excellence technical leader and director's delegate - owning technical strategy, architecture, and customer / requirements engagement for multi-product AI programmes and a cross-functional team of 10+ engineers across vision, AI and Agentic systems, mobile, cloud, DevOps and QA, with full ownership of the technical and delivery outcome and influence across functions.
- I scale teams and platforms through clear strategy, strong engineering governance and accountable ownership - building leaders, not just shipping code.