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Khaled Zaky

Hey, I'm Khaled

I build secure platforms across identity, cloud, and agentic AI.

Senior Director, Agentic AI Platform Engineering at RBC Borealis

I've spent the last 12+ years designing and operating large-scale cloud, identity, and platform systems — mostly in highly regulated environments where security isn't optional and the stakes are real.

Right now I'm a Senior Director at RBC Borealis AI, where I lead the engineering vision for the bank's agentic AI platform. My day-to-day spans platform architecture, identity integration, orchestration patterns, observability, and governance. I work closely with Global Security, IAM, and Enterprise Architecture to make sure what we build actually holds up in production and meets the regulatory bar.

Before this, I was a Senior Product Manager (Technical) at Amazon Web Services, where I owned product strategy for AWS sign-in security, MFA, passkeys, and credential risk. I led the design and launch of passkeys and multiple MFA devices for AWS IAM, and played a key role in root MFA enforcement — the kind of work that touches millions of customers and has zero room for error. I also served as Amazon's representative on the FIDO Alliance board and contributed to the W3C WebAuthn Working Group, where I helped shape global standards for passwordless authentication.

Before AWS, I was Director of Product Management for Cloud & Transformation at RBC, where I owned strategy and roadmap for the bank's enterprise cloud platform and led cloud, infrastructure, and AIOps product teams. Prior to that, I held product and architecture roles at TD Bank and Rogers Communications, and started my career writing code at BlackBerry, Siemens, and McMaster University.

I also teach at BrainStation, where I mentor future product leaders and help them connect technical depth with real-world product thinking.

What drives me is a pretty simple idea: intelligent and secure systems should be accessible to everyone. I care about making things that are usable, trustworthy, and built to last.

Background & Credentials

BEng, Software Engineering

McMaster University, 2014

P.Eng AWS Certified Architect AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner CIDPRO Foundation Certified Scrum Product Owner FIDO Alliance W3C WebAuthn

Current focus areas

Agentic AI platforms
Identity and authentication
Cloud and distributed systems
Product strategy and platform design
Usable security and developer experience

How I work

  • Start with customer and operational reality
  • Treat security and usability as design constraints, not tradeoffs
  • Prefer clear platform primitives over one-off solutions
  • Write to clarify decisions and align teams
  • Build iteratively with strong feedback loops

About this site

  • A living archive of what I'm learning and building
  • Notes and essays on platform design, identity, and AI
  • A sandbox to practice modern tools and publish in public

Technical details

  • Designed and coded on a Mac
  • Built with Astro and Tailwind CSS
  • Coded in Windsurf
  • Source code hosted on GitHub
  • Deployed with AWS CodeBuild on each push to GitHub, with local caching for faster builds
  • Hosted on Amazon S3 with Origin Access Control — public access fully blocked
  • Served through Amazon CloudFront with HTTPS enforcement, gzip/Brotli compression, and security headers
  • URL rewriting handled by a CloudFront Function at the edge
  • DNS managed by Amazon Route 53, secured with a wildcard TLS certificate from ACM
  • Blog posts are enriched and polished by an AI agent powered by Amazon Bedrock — I write the draft, the agent does research and styling using my voice profile
  • Data charts are code-rendered as SVG — no AI-generated images, no stock photos