Last month I wrote about Kalvium’s Career Advisory Board and named 21 of its 24 members with confidence. I left three out on purpose. The source document had them in a layout that didn’t extract cleanly, and I’d rather publish a smaller, correct list than a complete, guessed one.
I went back and checked the three names properly. Here’s what they add, and why I bothered.
Why three names sat out
The Student Success Report lays the Career Advisory Board out as a grid: name, title, company, repeated in rows of five or six. Most of that grid converts to plain text without trouble. Each card lands on its own line, and matching a name to a company is trivial.
One row didn’t. Gaurav Agarwal, Himanshu Varma, and Kailash Nadh sit together in a three-column block, and when that page turns into text, their names, titles, and companies each collapse onto a single shared line. Read casually, a name could pair with either of the companies next to it. I wasn’t going to publish “Kailash Nadh, CTO at Amazon” or “Himanshu Varma, at Zerodha” on a guess, so I scoped the earlier piece to the 21 I could verify and said so.
What resolves the column ambiguity
Text extracted from a PDF still carries its horizontal position on the page, even after the visual table structure is gone. Every character in that flattened block has an offset from the start of the line, and if the underlying table was genuinely columnar, the name, title, and company for the same person should share close to the same offset across their three separate lines.
They do. Gaurav Agarwal’s name starts at almost exactly the same horizontal position as “at 1mg.” Himanshu Varma’s starts where “at Amazon” starts. Kailash Nadh’s starts where “at Zerodha” starts. That’s not a coincidence three times running. It’s the table’s real column structure, still visible in the numbers even though the visual grid is gone.
It also happens to match what’s publicly known. Kailash Nadh is widely known as Zerodha’s CTO, not Amazon’s. That’s a fact I could check against a second, independent source that has nothing to do with Kalvium at all, and it’s exactly the kind of check I’d want before naming someone as a curriculum contributor.
So the corrected reading: Gaurav Agarwal, Co-Founder and Director at 1mg. Himanshu Varma, Software Development at Amazon. Kailash Nadh, CTO at Zerodha.
Why I bothered with three names
Because who’s actually on a curriculum board changes what you can honestly claim about the curriculum.
I’ve hired for engineering teams at Google and at HackerRank. A board with 21 confirmed, currently-working tech leaders is already a real board, not a brochure list. But the specific mix of companies represented matters more than the headcount. A board stacked entirely with fintech founders would tell you the curriculum is calibrated to one kind of engineering culture. A board that spans a healthtech consumer platform, a hyperscale logistics and cloud operation, and a bootstrapped, engineering-led broking company is calibrated to something broader.
Kailash Nadh is a specific and useful addition to that mix. Zerodha is a fintech and broking platform. 1mg, where Gaurav Agarwal is Co-Founder and Director, is a healthtech and consumer-pharmacy platform, with its own compliance and trust expectations. Amazon, where Himanshu Varma works, is a hyperscale e-commerce and cloud operation at a different order of scale entirely. None of those three engineering environments evaluate a fresh graduate the same way a fintech platform or a fast-moving startup would.
Three additional names, three additional engineering cultures the curriculum has to answer to. That’s the part worth naming, not just the count going from 21 to 24.
What this doesn’t change
The board’s documented influence on the curriculum doesn’t move because of this correction. The DOJO problem sets were already calibrated using board input before this trio was confirmed. The Mastery layer, assessed through codebases and deployments rather than written exams, was already attributed to the same group. The two specialisation tracks, Software Product Engineering and AI and Future Technologies, trace to the same board input regardless of whether all 24 names were individually confirmed.
What changes is completeness, and the specific texture that Kailash Nadh’s presence adds. The earlier piece named 21 members and explicitly scoped itself that way. It doesn’t need an edit. It was accurate about what it claimed. This piece exists because getting the last three right, rather than leaving them ambiguous indefinitely, is worth a few hundred words on its own.
The measure that still matters most
None of this replaces the outcome. As of March 2026, 82.40% of Batch 2026 was placed, with the batch still months from graduation. Median offer was ₹16.5 LPA, floor ₹15 LPA, highest ₹36 LPA. 28% of placed students took international roles.
A verified board is one input into a result like that, not the whole explanation. What it tells you is narrower and more checkable: the people who shaped what students practise are still, today, running the kinds of engineering teams that eventually hire them. That claim now covers all 24 names, not 21 of them.
For the full board and what its input produced in the curriculum itself, the 24 tech leaders who helped design Kalvium’s curriculum is the fuller piece.
For the two specialisation tracks the board’s input shaped, Kalvium’s two CSE tracks explained covers the subject-level differences.
For what a Kalvium student actually builds across four years under that curriculum, what a Kalvium student builds in four years walks the arc.
Anil is a co-founder of Kalvium and previously led engineering teams at Google and HackerRank. He writes about what the Indian tech market actually rewards, from the interview side of the table. Read more from Anil or browse the btech category.