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

Generalist AI Engineer. Currently working on agentic capabilities for interactive hyper-realistic 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

Senior Software Engineer
November 2025
 — 
Present
Tavus (YC Summer '21)

Building agentic capabilities for interactive hyper-realistic video avatars

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

    First full-time hire, owned engineering end-to-end at Hypotenuse AI. Architecting and scaling AI-powered content and image pipelines, cloud infrastructure, and DevOps workflows while mentoring the team and working with product to drive reliable, high-impact releases.

    • Owned architecture, reliability, and roadmap for AI content systems at scale (1M+ users, P99 <500ms, >99.999% availability) - balancing cost, velocity, and product tradeoffs
    • Established engineering standards and mentored 25+ engineers; drove team-wide velocity improvements (70% faster CI, 50% faster PR cycles) and instituted observability/incident practices that cut MTTA to <60s.
    • Accountable for platform economics and operational excellence - delivered 30% infrastructure cost reduction while scaling LLM and media workloads to 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)
    Present
     — 
    September 2020
    Bachelor of Engineering in Information Systems Technology and Design

    Skills

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