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

Generalist AI Engineer. Currently working on agentic capabilities for conversational video avatars at Tavus (YC S21).

Previously built scalable agentic systems for ecommerce at Hypotenuse AI (YC S20), and developed computer vision models for instance segmentation and real-time object detection systems at Qritive and Red Dot Robotics.

Experience

Machine Learning Engineer
November 2025 – present
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