Kumar is the Co-founder and Chief Technology Officer of Tejas Networks. He has nearly three decades of experience in the field of telecommunications. He is a Fellow of the Indian National Academy of Engineering. In 2000, he received the Swarnajayanti Fellowship from the Department of Science and Technology, Government of India, which is awarded to outstanding young scientists to pursue basic research in frontier areas of science and technology.. Kumar has co-authored the bestselling book titled "Optical Networks: A Practical Perspective" which is currently in its third edition. He is also a recipient of the prestigious IEEE W.R.G. Baker Prize Paper Award in 1997 which is presented for the most outstanding paper reporting original work in the Transactions, Journals, and Magazines of the Societies or in the Proceedings of the IEEE. In November 2021, he was elevated to IEEE Fellow status for his extraordinary and continued contributions to the field of optical networking. He is a recipient of the ‘CTO of the Year’ award from ET Telecom in 2022.
Kumar was the first chairperson of the governing council of Telecommunications Standards Development Society, India (TSDSI) which is an organizational partner of 3GPP, the global standards body responsible for formulating 5G standards. Prior to joining Tejas, he was an associate professor at the Indian Institute of Science, Bengaluru and a research staff member at the IBM Thomas J. Watson Research Center, Yorktown Heights, New York.
Kumar holds a B.Tech in Electrical Engineering (Electronics) from the Indian Institute of Technology (IIT), Madras and an M.S and PhD from the California Institute of Technology, Pasadena, USA (Caltech). At Caltech he was selected for the IEEE Charles LeGeyt Fortescue Scholarship, an annual award given to only one first year graduate student of Electrical Engineering studying in the U.S.A. Kumar received the Distinguished Alumnus Award from IIT Madras in 2013.​
