Performance Engineering Lead
INTERNATIONAL EXCELLENCE RESEARCH AWARD in the field of Performance Engineering
Gunjan Shegade is a performance engineering leader, researcher, author, and speaker with more than 18 years of experience in performance engineering. Her work centers on a challenge every modern organization faces: making sure digital applications keep performing reliably as users, demand, and business needs grow. Born in Maharashtra, India, Gunjan earned her bachelor’s degree from the University of Mumbai and began her career as a hands-on engineer. She has since built experience across healthcare, aviation, retail, insurance, and financial services, industries where a slow or failed system carries real consequences. Her career has followed the evolution of enterprise technology itself, from traditional and mainframe environments to cloud platforms, containerized microservices, and Kubernetes-based architectures. That range gives her a rare perspective on modernizing systems the business cannot afford to lose. Gunjan is a Performance Engineering Lead for enterprise applications for a Walt Disney client in the media and entertainment domain, where customer experience matters most. Her role includes developing AI-assisted performance strategies for complex application portfolios and validating systems under demanding workloads. She analyzes application behavior, identifies bottlenecks, and provides root cause analysis and recommendations to improve system performance. She also evaluates capacity requirements as demand grows and leads distributed teams that support mission-critical applications. Her work increasingly brings artificial intelligence into the performance engineering lifecycle. She applies AI and LLM in the areas where traditional methods struggle to keep pace with modern, distributed systems, with the goal of moving performance engineering from reacting to problems toward anticipating them. Gunjan has authored more than 19 peer-reviewed research papers, including publications in Scopus-indexed journals, connecting emerging technology with practical engineering problems. She also serves as a peer reviewer and manuscript evaluator. Her books brings together lessons from her career on performance validation, capacity planning, application behavior, and modernization. She has also shared her expertise through keynotes, academic speaker series, and professional forums. Her contributions have earned a growing list of honors. She received the Distinguished Women Researcher Award at an international conference organized by Research Education Solutions in association with T. John College Autonomous, Bengaluru. In September 2026, she received the Research Excellence & Innovation Award at the International Conference on Computer Vision for Smart Sustainable Systems (CV-S3 2026), at MAHE, Dubai Campus. On September 27, 2026, she received the International Excellence Research Award at the ISSN International Science & Technology Awards (IISTAC 2026) in Coimbatore, Tamil Nadu, in the field of Performance Engineering and AI in Performance Engineering. Gunjan focuses on AI applications in performance engineering, helping organizations strengthen the digital services people rely on every day. Her work shows how professional practice and research can reinforce each other, turning hands-on experience into knowledge that helps build scalable, dependable digital systems.