About
I'm a Principal AI Architect with 20 years of product engineering experience across Silicon Valley and India. My career spans deep systems engineering at Brocade, founding and scaling a B2B SaaS company, and architecting production AI products at an early-stage startup. I enjoy ambiguous, high-impact technical problems where architecture, product judgment and hands-on engineering intersect.
The story
After an M.S. in Computer Engineering at NC State, I spent five years onsite in San Jose at Brocade building high-performance systems — including a DPDK software load balancer that took throughput from 1 Gbps to 160 Gbps. When I moved back to India, the same US team kept me on remotely for another year and a half, working across India–US time zones. Distributed-by-default before it was fashionable.
In 2016 I co-founded Naanal Technologies, a bootstrapped B2B logistics SaaS. I validated the 3PL problem by delivering cross-carrier tracking manually before building, scoped the MVP to one complete journey while invoicing stayed manual for eight months, built the differentiating allocation engine and bought the commodity parts — and scaled to ₹6 Cr (~$700K) annual revenue, 1M shipments a month at 99.9% uptime, with engineering grown to 30. Early-stage engineering, I learned, is less about building more and more about making the right decisions.
Since 2021 I've been Principal Technical Architect at a pre-Series A B2B AI startup, working alongside the CTO and a 14-member engineering team. Production AI, not demos: a multi-tenant platform at 50M TPM, accuracy from 60% to 85%, LLM costs cut 5×, MTTR from 4 hours to 10 minutes, enterprise security from tenant isolation to SOC 2 and GDPR — and a legacy-to-GenAI-first transition landed in 8 months.
Both sides of the table kept teaching the same lesson: the 0→1 journey is decided by a small number of high-consequence technical decisions. Startup Engineering — the forthcoming book — is that lesson made systematic: a technical decision framework for the 0→1 journey in the AI era.
For the record
If you’re a CTO or technical founder building an early-stage AI product and need additional senior architecture depth, I’d be happy to understand what you’re working through.
The best way to reach me is on LinkedIn.
Or email: selvaganapathyc@gmail.com