Gopalakrishna Hegde

Software Engineer · Applied AI · Co-founder

Gopalakrishna Hegde

Staff Engineer · Applied AI · Full-Stack & Distributed Systems

Technical co-founder and hands-on engineer with 10+ years building production AI systems, SaaS platforms, AI research and bare-metal infrastructure. Deep expertise in building custom agent orchestration, real-time backends down to the hardware they run on. Designed and ran a private data centre that beat a managed-cloud baseline on both latency and cost. Used to shipping ambitious systems under startup constraints.

Core Strengths

  • Production AI Systems: Built Hostbento, a production agentic website builder on a custom Python orchestration harness rather than a wrapper over an off-the-shelf framework, with MCP, LLM integration, multi-agent coordination, and RAG.
  • Infrastructure & Performance: Designed and built a private bare-metal data centre. Experienced with bare-metal design, Nginx, Redis, high-availability systems, event-driven architectures (Kafka), performance engineering.
  • Full-Stack Engineering: Proficient in Python (Django, FastAPI), TypeScript (Vue.js, React, Next.js), PostgreSQL, ClickHouse, WebSockets, Kafka, Test-Driven Development; end-to-end ownership.
  • Technical Leadership & Research: Co-founder across two startups. Own architecture and design decisions, mentor engineers, and carry customer-facing delivery. Best Paper at ESWEEK, with research in ACM TECS, ESWEEK, and IEEE FCCM.

Professional Experience

Co-founder & CTO, Konigle Pte Ltd

May 2019 – Present

Singapore · B2B AI & SaaS company

  • Primary architect and lead developer of a multi-tenant SaaS platform for e-commerce pricing and promotions. Grew it to 1,000+ B2B customers across 70+ countries at sub-3% 90-day churn. Built webhook and pricing events pipeline handling multi-million events a day.
  • Architected and built an Heroku-style, agent-first cloud hosting PaaS (Hostbento Cloud) for AI-assisted development workflows, with zero-downtime deployments, rollback, and observability. PaaS supports multiple cloud providers.
  • Designed the agent orchestration harness, real-time client sync over WebSockets, and the full conversation to generation to hosting pipeline behind the company's agentic website builder and hosting, Hostbento. Over 10,000 websites built and hosted.
  • Built a website analytics event-ingestion pipeline handling over a million events a day, with an analytics database tuned for sub-second dashboard queries.
  • Built an internal agent-deployment platform with one-click deploys, context versioning, rollback, and observability for AI agents and assistants such as Hermes.
  • Designed and ran a private bare-metal data centre, handling capacity, network, nginx load balancing, DR, and monitoring. Cut p99 latency from ~2s to under 100ms at roughly 2.3× lower cost than the previous GCP Cloud Run setup. Multi-node Postgres cluster with continuous replication and MinIO cluster for CDN.
  • Gathered customer requirements, built AI-native custom solutions for businesses, and deployed them on the Hostbento Cloud platform.
  • Set technical direction and review standards across the stack, maintained Konigle SDK, and mentored more than 10 engineers and interns.

Tech Stack: Python, Django, Vue.js, Celery, Postgres, ClickHouse, MinIO, Github Actions, Nginx, FastAPI, WebSockets, Redis

Co-founder & CTO, AIMLedge Pte Ltd

Jan 2018 – May 2019

Singapore · Entrepreneur First (pre-seed)

  • Built on-device deep learning computer-vision models for edge hardware using quantization, pruning, and custom OpenCL kernels. Reached ~12–15× inference speedup with minimal accuracy loss.
  • Shipped an end-to-end IoT stack into production pilots: edge device management, a real-time video-analytics pipeline, and a cloud backend (Node.js, React, WebSockets, MQTT, TimescaleDB).
  • Led technical discussions with customers and partners, and deployed pilot systems into customer environments.

Tech Stack: C, C++, Node.js, React, TensorFlow, WebSockets, MQTT, TimescaleDB, Deep Learning, Object Detection

R&D Engineer, Panasonic R&D Center

Jan 2017 – Dec 2017

Singapore

  • Optimized computer-vision and deep-learning models for real-time performance in shipping consumer-electronics products. Built a deep learning inference library. Mentored junior engineers on model optimization.

Tech Stack: C, C++, OpenCL, Deep Learning, Object Detection

Research Associate, Nanyang Technological University

Oct 2015 – Dec 2016

Singapore

  • Published award-winning research on efficient deep-learning inference for constrained hardware, including the ESWEEK 2016 Best Paper. Authored CaffePresso, an open-source CNN-acceleration library for embedded SoCs.

Technical Skills

LanguagesPython (Django, FastAPI) · TypeScript (Vue, React, Next.js) · Node.js · C / C++
AI & AgentsLLM integration · multi-agent orchestration · MCP · RAG · vector databases · prompt engineering · AI observability
Data & MessagingPostgreSQL · ClickHouse · Redis · Kafka · RabbitMQ · event-driven architectures
InfrastructureBare-metal · Linux · Docker · nginx · GCP · AWS · Prometheus / Grafana · CI/CD · high-availability design · Kubernetes (basic)

Education

M.S. Computer Science & Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore · GPA 4.88/5.0
B.E. Electronics & Communication Engineering, PES University, Bangalore · GPA 9.24/10

Selected Publications

View all →
  • CaffePresso: accelerating CNNs on embedded SoCs. ACM TECS 2017, and ESWEEK / CASES 2016 (Best Paper).
  • Embedded FPGA accelerators and energy-efficient saliency on soft vector processors. IEEE FCCM 2015–2016.