About the Author
“As I reflect on this journey, I recognize that while not every solution we build will change the entire world, it does change the world for thousands and millions of users, citizens, and beneficiaries who rely on what we create. That impact matters, and that’s what makes this work so meaningful.”
Murali Mallina
CTO, Tria | Founder, Teaching for Good
Murali Mallina is CTO at Tria and founder of Teaching for Good. Over 27 years, he has built and led engineering organizations across seven countries — startups, consulting firms, system integrators, and large enterprises. The through line has never been a specific technology. It has been the harder problem: how do you build teams that consistently deliver meaningful outcomes, navigate change, and keep improving when the landscape keeps shifting under them?
That question — organizational transformation, change leadership, and making digital work actually work — is where the bulk of his expertise lives. Designing Centers of Excellence. Hacking the culture of organizations resistant to change. Building the operational infrastructure that separates teams that accelerate from those that stall. These are not new interests. They are the work of 27 years.
For the past nine years, that work has happened in the context of federal agencies. Not working inside them, but alongside them — partnering with agencies across civilian and defense missions to build the teams and software systems that serve millions of users and citizens. That proximity to high-accountability, high-consequence environments shapes how he thinks about AI deployment: you don’t get to learn governance after something goes wrong when the stakeholders are the public.
Agentic AI entered his practice in earnest over the last two years — and it arrived not as a new technology to evaluate, but as the most powerful accelerant he has seen for the kinds of transformation he has been working on for decades. The organizational patterns that determine whether AI deployments succeed or fail are the same ones that determine whether any digital transformation succeeds or fails. The difference is the speed and autonomy of the failure modes.
This is his second playbook. His first — Mission-Driven Teams Playbook for the Age of Agentic AI — addresses the team layer directly: how to align teams around mission, connect them to the users they serve, and build the human infrastructure that makes any technology investment — including agentic AI — actually deliver. If this playbook covers what to build and how to govern it, that one covers who has to show up to make it work.
Murali speaks at conferences and meetups on AI/ML, DevSecOps, agility, and scalable architectures. He founded Teaching for Good in 2018 to combine teaching and mentoring with nonprofit fundraising, and ran 15+ Google CS First clubs introducing computer science to students.
Connect with Murali on LinkedIn →
Read the companion playbook: Mission-Driven Teams →