Nikhil Mungel
Head of AI R&D at Cribl
Nikhil is based in San Francisco, building distributed systems and AI teams at SaaS companies for over 15 years. His background spans AI, observability platforms, developer ecosystems, and high-scale consumer social products, with leadership roles at Substack, Splunk, ThoughtWorks, and most recently, Cribl where he currently serves as the Head of AI R&D.
Media
Featured commentary in InfoWorld on AI skills for DevOps success in 2026.
Featured in StarCIO's 2026 predictions roundup alongside industry leaders.
Bylined article in Unite.AI on the significance of MCP for enterprise IT.
Quoted expert commentary in CIO.com on the shift to managing virtual agents.
Featured commentary in Centizen blog.
Guest appearance on 'Cribl: The Stream Life' Podcast (Episode 105).
Contributor to Chapter 10: 'Cribl, AI, and You' in this published book.
Current Writing
Dives into what is team engagement and explores ways to track it.
Exploring how to assess engagement across teams of teams.
A look at the factors that impact team engagement.
Deeper dive into the factors that impact team engagement.
Guidance on conducting intentional one-on-one meetings.
The importance of lateral one-on-one meetings with peers and adjacent organizations.
A deeper look at key factors that contribute to the success of engineering teams.
Explore the central role of attention in our conscious thought and its impact on mental processes.
Cribl Blog post on human-centric AI design.
Cribl Blog post on AI systems design.
Co-authored with Nick Heudecker. Analyzes the Model Context Protocol (MCP) as an existential threat and opportunity for SaaS vendors.
Technical tutorial on collecting real-time GPU telemetry for AI/ML workloads.
Inventions
845 Total Citations | h-index: 5 | i10-index: 5
US Patent 11,113,294 | Cited by 45
US Patent 11,792,291, 11,349,947, & 10,855,793 | Cited by 702
US Patent 11,263,268 | Cited by 48
US Patent 12,093,318 & 11,386,158 | Cited by 48
US Patent App. 18/974,599
Technical Writing
Front page of Hacker News at #2 in April 2013.
Widely cited technical resource.
Hobby Projects
The best tool for HTTP headers
Speaking
Speaker at RubyConf 2012.
Invited speaker for Splunk's user conference, discussing how to analyze logs from microservices
Invited speaker at Splunk’s user conference, presenting how a commercial observability cloud platform is operated at scale
Workshop at CodeDay Labs mentoring early-career engineers.
Featured speaker at CriblCon 2025, discussing schema transformations and human-in-the-loop AI.
BrightTALK Webinar co-presentation on onboarding data and generating queries with Copilot.