Dipali Kulshrestha

‘Dipali is a cloud architect but she’s also an educator, artist, and passionate advocate for storytelling in tech’

Part of the Tech Women Celebration 50 – a curated list of some of the most inspirational women working at all levels of tech

Dipali Kulshrestha is a pioneering AWS Cloud Architect and a recognized AWS Hero, known for her transformative work in building secure, scalable data platforms in the financial services industry. With over a decade of experience, she leads the Data Lake Cloud Platform at NatWest, championing data governance, real-time analytics, and cloud modernization initiatives. Dipali actively promotes responsible innovation by bridging the gap between technical strategy and regulatory compliance.

A passionate community leader, Dipali co-organizes AWS Community Day Delhi and runs initiatives that empower over 1,100 members of the AWS User Group NCR. She is also a prolific LinkedIn Learning instructor with five successful AWS-focused courses, and a strong advocate for women in technology. Her hands-on workshops, storytelling sessions, and mentorship programs have inspired hundreds of early-career technologists.

Dipali's work consistently reflects a commitment to raising the bar on quality, inclusivity, and continuous learning. She recently participated in an exclusive roundtable with Amazon CTO Dr. Werner Vogels and was celebrated at AWS Empower India for her community leadership. Her impact spans both enterprise and grassroots levels, making her a force for change in tech.

What do you consider the nominees biggest achievement to date?

Dipali’s most significant achievement lies in successfully bridging enterprise-scale cloud transformation with grassroots tech community empowerment, especially in underrepresented regions of India.

At NatWest, Dipali leads the AWS Data Lake Cloud Platform, where she architected a secure, cost-optimized, and governance-first data lake serving regulatory, real-time analytics, and AI workloads. She championed the integration of Kafka-based real-time data ingestion pipelines.

What is the most significant challenge the nominee has overcome?

Dipali’s most significant challenge was leading the design and adoption of a governed, enterprise-wide Data Marketplace at NatWest, transforming how data is shared, discovered, and consumed across siloed teams.

As Cloud Data Lake Platform Architect, she identified recurring issues: duplicated ingestion pipelines, manual access requests, and fragmented metadata causing inefficiency and compliance risks. Dipali envisioned a self-service marketplace, enabling governed data publishing and access with clear ownership and auditability.

The toughest hurdle was trust. Producers feared misuse, while consumers lacked transparency around quality and compliance. To address this, Dipali built a pilot marketplace integrating and created reusable templates for seamless onboarding. She also led cross-team working groups to define governance standards and introduced data contracts for clarity on SLAs and classifications.

Within months, the platform scaled across multiple domains, supported by Dipali’s workshops and enablement sessions.

“Dipali made it simple for our teams to share high-quality data with confidence. Her federated model truly shifted how we collaborate.”
- Data Product Owner, Retail Analytics

Tell us something about the nominee people would find surprising

What surprises most people about Dipali is that, despite being a deeply technical cloud architect, she’s also an educator, artist, and passionate advocate for storytelling in tech.

When she’s not architecting scalable data platforms, Dipali runs creative workshops where school students design cartoon characters and write stories, sparking imagination and confidence in young minds. She believes storytelling isn’t just for fiction, but a powerful way to make technical ideas relatable and memorable.

Dipali brings this same approach to her professional life. Her talks and workshops are known for vivid analogies, real-world metaphors, and the occasional Hindi expression, helping audiences connect with complex topics like cloud governance or generative AI.

She’s also authoring a book, ‘Python in Your Pocket,’ designed to teach programming through concise lessons, real-life examples, and practical hacks.