Krishna Penukonda
Singapore, SG
krishna@penukonda.me

AI systems engineer committed to reducing risks from advanced AI, with 6+ years of production ML experience and ongoing alignment research training through TARA. Led engineering at Hypotenuse AI across product development, infrastructure, LLM evaluation & observability, and developer tooling.

Experience


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

Built backend and agentic capabilities for a real-time conversational video platform.

  • Shipped improvements to agent memory, greetings, and proactive-outreach behavior through production-log analysis, targeted observability tooling, and prompt evaluation
  • Evaluated third-party agent-monitoring platforms for detecting and analysing undesirable agent behaviours
Lead Software Engineer
January 2021 – August 2025
Hypotenuse AI (YC Summer '20)

First full-time engineer; later led engineering across production LLM systems, infrastructure, and developer platform for enterprise e-commerce workflows

  • Built evaluation systems for multi-stage LLM pipelines using customer-derived test sets and rubric-based LLM judges to measure factuality, brand voice, and policy compliance
  • Developed adversarial tests and safeguards for confidential-data extraction, model-identity disclosure, prohibited-content generation, competitor mentions, malformed outputs, jailbreaks, and repeated ToS abuse
  • Built prompt/output tracing and human-feedback infrastructure for failure analysis, output quality monitoring, and producing customer-specific fine-tuning datasets
  • Established engineering standards and mentored 20+ engineers; cut pull-request cycles 50%, CI time 70%, and incident MTTA to under 60 seconds through automation and unified tracing, metrics, and logs
Computer Vision Engineer
October 2018 – December 2018

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


Technical training (ongoing) in AI Alignment Research, following the ARENA curriculum
  • Completed ARENA exercises on linear probes and sparse autoencoders, working with model activations and learned feature representations
August 2026
Intensive course in AGI Strategy
Singapore University of Technology and Design (SUTD)
September 2020
B.Eng in Computer Science

Skills


Core Skills:
LLM Evaluation · Full Stack Development · LLM Observability · Prompt Engineering · Distributed Systems · Technical Leadership
Technologies:
Python · TypeScript · PyTorch · DSPy · FastAPI · OpenTelemetry · AWS · PostgreSQL · Redis · Celery · GitHub Actions · Docker · React.js · Rust