Utkarsh Karmarkar

Senior WLAN Test Engineer with 7+ years validating Wi-Fi 6/6E and Wi-Fi 7 (802.11ax/be) access points and chipsets across functional, performance, regression and interoperability testing. Leads end-to-end QA for enterprise Wi-Fi 7 APs — from RFE intake to release sign-off — covering MLO, preamble puncturing and AFC. Hands-on with RF chambers, attenuators and Candela LANforge test beds; strong in Wireshark-based root-cause analysis, defect triage and cross-functional work in Agile teams.

WiFi System Test Engineer at Arista Networks (2023-09 – 2026-07)

• Lead functional, regression and system test cycles for Arista's Wi-Fi 7 (802.11be) AP portfolio — C-460/C-460E, C-430, C-400 and O-435 — across indoor and outdoor enterprise deployments.
• Validated AFC on the O-435 outdoor platform, enabling standard-power 6 GHz operation in line with regulatory requirements.
• Wrote and executed test plans for RFE-driven features — Wi-Fi 7 Mesh, Secure NTP and GPSK delivering on-time sign-off each release.
• Verify the enterprise networking and security stack every release: L2/L3 tunneling, VxLAN, IPsec, EoGRE, NAT, RADIUS, Dynamic VLAN, MAC ACL, client isolation, load balancing, PMF and WPA2/WPA3-802.1X (192-bit).
• Test roaming and RF management (802.11k/v/r, DFS, ACS/DCS) on RF chamber and attenuator-based benches.

Lead Validation Engineer at NXP Semiconductors (2022-05 – 2023-07)

IoT Wi-Fi chipset validation · team of 7

• Owned validation strategy for Wi-Fi chipsets IW416, W8987, W8997 and W9098 on NXP's i.MX 8M platform series, leading a team of 7 engineers.
• Directed sanity, regression, feature and protocol testing in STA, AP and P2P roles across Linux, Android and FreeRTOS BSPs.
• Benchmarked throughput and Rate vs. Range performance across chipset variants.
• Built test plans and cases and led testbed bring-up for manual and automated execution, reducing defect escapes before release.
• Drove bug triage and RCA in Jira with firmware teams to close issues ahead of milestones.

Senior Software Engineer at GlobalEdge Software (2018-06 – 2022-05)

Promoted Trainee → Software Engineer → Senior · Client: Amazon India, 2.4/5 GHz station card & AP testing

• Owned end-to-end product testing through EVT, DVT and PVT to deployment for dual-band Wi-Fi station cards and access points.
• Authored test plans for 802.11r/k/v roaming, DFS, security and PoE; ran daily/weekly functional and stress/stability regression on AP boards.
• Root-caused wireless security defects (WEP, WPA, WPA2, 802.1X-TLS) via Wireshark captures and validated throughput with iPerf.
• Led IOP and user-experience testing with Raspberry Pi, Ethernet/cellular backhaul and Amazon Fire TV Stick on 2.4 and 5 GHz.

B.E. in Information Technology – DKTE Society's Textile & Engineering Institute (Autonomous), Ichalkaranji (2018)