By BigGo Finance
Publication Date: 2026-10-30 11:55:00
Cisco Systems has handed one of the largest software modernization projects in its history to a 27-year-old engineer who was, until recently, buried deep in the organization chart — and given him an effectively unlimited budget for AI coding tools to get it done.
Padmanabhan Krishnamurthy, known inside the company as “Paddy,” has been tasked with rewriting 98% of Cisco’s legacy code within 24 months, with a four-week window to prove the approach works. The assignment came directly from Jeetu Patel, the networking giant’s president and chief product officer, according to an account Patel gave at a small roundtable dinner.
“I’ve given him unlimited tokens because he’s going to refactor code,” Patel said. “So I’m like, you can go, you can go nuts.”
Krishnamurthy arrived at Cisco in 2025 through the company’s acquisition of EzDubs, a real-time translation startup he co-founded in 2023. Despite entering with founder and chief executive experience, he had been placed in a role Patel…
