Pavan Navarathna is a Senior Engineering Manager at Veeam and an experienced engineering leader specializing in cloud‑native data protection, SaaS backup, and enterprise software architecture. At Veeam, he currently leads a greenfield initiative within Veeam Data Cloud (VDC), defining architecture and accelerating the delivery of next‑generation SaaS backup workloads.
Earlier in 2025, Pavan led the engineering efforts for VDC Vault, a blob storage‑as‑a‑service offering within Veeam Data Cloud. Under his leadership, the team successfully scaled product development, integrated Vault into the broader VDC platform, and enabled advanced capabilities for cloud‑based data resilience.
Before taking on his current role, Pavan spent seven years at Kasten (acquired by Veeam in 2020), where he built and led engineering teams focused on cloud‑native backup and disaster recovery for Kubernetes environments. He drove integrations across cloud and storage ecosystems and maintained Kanister, a CNCF Sandbox project for application‑level data management on Kubernetes. He also contributed to other CNCF initiatives, advancing open‑source innovation in the cloud‑native community.
Earlier in his career, Pavan worked at NetApp as a Member of Technical Staff, developing filesystem features for AltaVault, a cloud‑integrated storage appliance. He began his career at Aryaka, building the SMB protocol proxy for its SD‑WAN‑as‑a‑Service product.
Notable Speaking Engagements
KubeCon + CloudNativeCon North America 2024 (Salt Lake City, UT) – Building Resilience: Effective Backup and Disaster Recovery for Vector Databases on Kubernetes
Cloud‑Native Rejekts 2023 (Chicago, IL) – Revolutionizing Data Backup in Kubernetes: Unlocking the Power of Change Block Tracking With CSI
Data on Kubernetes Day EU 2022 (Valencia, Spain) – Kanister & Kopia: An Open‑Source Data Protection Match Made in Heaven
Data on Kubernetes Day NA 2021 (Los Angeles, CA) – Kanister: Application Level Data Operations on Kubernetes
Guest – Cloud‑Native Multi‑Cluster Podcast (2023)
Areas of Expertise
Cloud and SaaS backup/recovery
Cloud‑native and Kubernetes‑based data protection
Engineering leadership and scalability
Filesystems and storage architecture
Open‑source advocacy and community engagement
Pavan brings together deep technical knowledge and visionary leadership to drive innovation in cloud‑native data resilience, helping Veeam customers and partners evolve their backup and recovery strategies for modern, distributed environments.
