Rahul Menon appointed Chief Executive Officer of Arclight Systems

Arclight Systems has appointed Rahul Menon as chief executive officer with effect from 16 August 2026. Menon has been the company’s chief operating officer since 2022 and succeeds the founder-chief executive, who moves to a non-executive chair role at the end of the financial year.

The appointment is the first time Arclight has promoted a chief executive from within. The company, which employs roughly 11,000 people across delivery centres in Bengaluru, Pune and Coimbatore, has spent four years shifting its revenue mix away from staff-augmentation contracts towards platform and managed-service engagements — a transition Menon has run operationally since taking the COO role.

Before the appointment

Menon joined Arclight in 2017 to lead its banking and financial services vertical, at the time the largest of the company’s four units and the slowest growing. He consolidated delivery into four hubs and reduced the number of active engagements by approximately a third, on the argument that the company was spending its best engineers defending accounts that had no realistic path to expansion. Vertical revenue declined for two quarters before recovering.

He was promoted to chief operating officer in 2022 with responsibility for all delivery, and inherited the company’s utilisation problem during a period when Indian IT services firms were carrying bench capacity built for demand that did not arrive. Before Arclight, Menon spent eleven years at Kestrel Advisory, latterly as a partner in its technology practice.

The mandate

Arclight has said publicly that it expects platform revenue to reach a third of the total by 2029, from roughly eighteen per cent today. Menon has not commented on the target since the appointment. In an internal note circulated to staff and reported by the company, he identified the operating review cadence as his first structural change, reducing it from a four-hour monthly session to ninety minutes.

They keep running their old job for six months because they are good at it.

Rahul Menon, on internal succession

The outgoing chief executive founded Arclight in 2008 and remains its second-largest individual shareholder. The company said the transition had been planned across an eighteen-month period and that no changes to the wider executive committee are expected.