Krishna Penukonda
Singapore, SG
krishna@penukonda.me
https://penukonda.me
penukonda
tasercake

Full-stack AI systems engineer focused on agent reliability, AI-native software, and control of increasingly capable AI systems. First full-time engineer at Hypotenuse AI (YC S20), where I helped build an industry-leading agentic ecommerce backend and AI-native product information management infra. At Tavus (YC S21), I worked on real-time conversational video avatar agents. Now looking to transition into working on AI safety and technical alignment problems full-time.

Experience

Machine Learning Engineer
November 2025 – June 2026
Tavus (YC Summer '21)

Building agentic capabilities for real-time conversational video avatars

Lead Software Engineer
January 2021 – August 2025
Hypotenuse AI (YC Summer '20)

First full-time hire. Owned engineering end-to-end; built and scaled AI-powered content and image generation pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps workflows while growing the team and keeping the quality bar high.

  • Owned architecture, reliability, and roadmap for AI content-generation systems at scale; balancing cost, velocity, and product tradeoffs
  • Established engineering standards and mentored 20+ engineers over 4 years; drove team-wide velocity improvements (50% faster PR cycles, 70% faster CI) and instituted observability/incident practices that cut MTTA to <60s.
  • Accountable for platform economics and operational excellence - 30% infrastructure cost reduction while scaling LLM and media workloads to meet enterprise SLAs.
Computer Vision Engineer
October 2018 – December 2018
Qritive

Developed Object Detection and Instance Segmentation models for use on gigapixel-scale medical images

  • Technologies: Python, Keras, TensorFlow, OpenCV, OpenSlide
Computer Vision Engineer
May 2018 – September 2018
Red Dot Robotics

Developed real-time Object Detection and Tracking models for deployment on autonomous vehicles

  • Technologies: Python, Keras, TensorFlow, OpenCV

Education

Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)
September 2020
Bachelor of Engineering in Information Systems Technology and Design

Skills

Core Skills:
Agent Engineering, LLMOps, Full Stack Development, DevOps, Cloud Architecture, Technical Leadership
Technologies:
Python, TypeScript, PyTorch, FastAPI, PostgreSQL, Celery, DynamoDB, Redis, AWS, OpenTelemetry, GitHub Actions, Vector Databases, Git, Docker, React.js, Rust