Photo of Praveen Penumaka

Praveen Penumaka

Backend engineer & engineering leader

With over 14 years in the software industry, including roles as Head of Technology and CTO, I am a hands-on full-stack and backend engineer and engineering leader. I build reliable, scalable backend services and distributed systems, from Amazon and GoJek to early-stage startups, mainly in Python, Django, Go and TypeScript on AWS and GCP.

I take end-to-end ownership of products and have delivered over 30 consumer-facing applications. My recent work focuses on computer vision and 3D reconstruction with Gaussian splatting.

praveen9920@gmail.com +91 7093230444 Hyderabad, India

Companies

Abolyn

Feb 2024 – Present

Senior Consulting Developer · Hyderabad

Working with the founder to ideate and build a minimum viable product, including an AI-based product filtering engine and a workflow powered by AI and Selenium that collects quotes from multiple instant-quote providers into a unified view.

Swadesh (Greentiger AI)

May 2022 – Jan 2024

Head of Technology · San Francisco

  • Led a cross-functional team of 4 engineers to design, build and launch a Neobank mobile app for immigrants from India to the US within 3 months, in time for the target seasonal customer base. An international remittance partner integration facilitated $100k in transactions within 2 weeks of launch.
  • Re-architected the Python backend to integrate multiple banking providers, working with external teams on regulatory compliance. Seamless provider switching improved leverage in negotiating financial terms.
  • Set the technical strategy and product roadmap with the founders; hired and mentored engineers and ran code reviews.

AtoB

Jul 2021 – Feb 2022

Senior Software Developer · Hyderabad, India

  • Architected a data workflow system that gathers and processes data from multiple providers, with a scalable ingestion pipeline in Python on AWS Lambda and automated tests. It opened a new revenue stream for the startup through new product features.
  • Hired and mentored engineers and ran code reviews.

GoJek

Jan 2019 – Jul 2021

Engineering Manager · Bangalore, India

  • Worked in the Marketplace team (matchmaking, pricing and incentives) on a pricing service built in Go on Kubernetes on GCP, handling rule-based and dynamic (surge) prices. Launched surge pricing in a new country, which increased revenue from that region.
  • Led the deployment of a machine learning demand-forecasting service with data scientists, built for real-time decisions with minimal latency. It saved $3 million per quarter.
  • Led the productization and modularization of internal API services, centralizing redundant services into reusable modules that cut development time for new features.
  • Hired and mentored engineers, ran code reviews, and maintained automated tests and monitoring for the team's distributed systems.

CreativeMindz

Apr 2016 – Jan 2019

Co-Founder & CTO · Hyderabad, India

  • Co-founded a services startup bridging industry-standard technologies and cutting-edge solutions. Managed client negotiations, onboarding and technical delivery, and owned the hiring pipeline, growing the company to 75 employees at its peak.
  • Delivered a complex platform for an MNC client within 3 months, which became the backbone for multiple business initiatives. The company generated over $100k in monthly revenue, with the Pizza Hut MENA application as its flagship project.

Prototyze

Feb 2015 – Feb 2016

Head of Technology · Goa, India

Managed a team of 40 developers building products from scratch, leading to the incubation and launch of multiple startups under the Prototyze umbrella. Set the technical strategy for each product and worked with founders, investors and business teams to make each one fundable. Three startups raised funding on the back of the products built by the team.

Amazon

Mar 2012 – Aug 2013

Software Development Engineer · Hyderabad, India

  • In the "Listmania" team, built a high-throughput microservice behind user-curated product lists on product detail pages, serving large traffic volumes with near-instant responses.
  • Built a highly available, fault-tolerant KYC service for EU-based Amazon sellers during registration, ensuring regulatory compliance while minimizing onboarding friction.

Kony Labs

Jun 2010 – Oct 2011

Associate Engineer · Hyderabad, India

Sole developer of the Toyota Shopping mobile application for iOS, Android and Blackberry. Built key features including QR code scanning and Augmented Reality SDK integration, and maintained the app.

Projects

Studio3D

Jul 2025 – Dec 2025

A computer vision platform that turns photos and videos into 3D Gaussian Splatting models using 3D reconstruction and photogrammetry with COLMAP, owned end to end as the only engineer (97 commits). It has a Flutter app for capture and viewing, a Django REST API, Firebase authentication and Nginx in front.

Long-running GPU training jobs run on an asynchronous queue (Celery and Redis) with separate Docker workers for COLMAP, video processing, splat training and the web viewer. The public beta is live as a subscription with usage limits, project status tracking with ETAs and downloadable models.

  • Python
  • Flutter
  • Django REST Framework
  • Celery
  • Redis
  • Docker
  • COLMAP
  • OpenSplat
  • Firebase Auth
  • Nginx

Gausstream

In progress

A system that streams level-of-detail (LOD) Gaussian splats to a viewer, so large scenes load progressively instead of all at once.

returnman

May 2026 – Jul 2026

An early-stage, multi-tenant return and exchange platform for Shopify merchants, with a customer portal, merchant dashboard and admin dashboard in Astro, backed by a Hono REST API and a multi-tenant PostgreSQL schema.

Includes Shopify OAuth per tenant and store, Inngest workflows, vendor adapters for WhatsApp, Unicommerce and ClickPost, and CI/CD with GitHub Actions, including database migrations.

  • TypeScript
  • pnpm + Nx monorepo
  • Astro
  • Hono
  • Drizzle ORM
  • PostgreSQL
  • Inngest
  • Docker
  • Caddy
  • GitHub Actions

Personal Finance Tracker

Feb 2026

A local-first, open source tool that reads an email export (mbox), uses a local LLM to classify financial emails and extract transactions, and stores them in SQLite. It generates an offline HTML dashboard of spending by category and over time, and no email or financial data leaves the machine.

  • Python 3.12
  • uv
  • SQLite
  • Ollama (llama3.2)

Mahabharatha Game

In progress

A 2D game set in Mahabharatha mythology, using AI-driven workflows for asset creation.

Personal CRM

In progress

A CRM for managing personal contacts.

The Forge Sauna

May 2026 – Aug 2026

Co-built the website for a mobile wood-fired sauna rental business in St. John's, Canada: a config-driven static site with rental booking forms on a Cloudflare Workers API, an admin page showing SignStack e-signature status, waiver pages with QR codes, and JSON-LD and Open Graph metadata.

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • YAML site config
  • Cloudflare Workers
  • SignStack

V-Organize

Jul 2026 – Oct 2026

Built the website for a home organizing service in Hyderabad: a multi-page static site on Cloudflare with on-site SEO (meta tags, Open Graph, JSON-LD, sitemap), a local landing page, WhatsApp booking links and Clarity analytics.

  • HTML
  • CSS
  • JavaScript
  • Cloudflare Workers
  • JSON-LD
  • Microsoft Clarity

numpygo

2020

A NumPy-style n-dimensional array library written in Go as a learning project. 44 stars on GitHub.

  • Go

Open source contributions

playcanvas/splat-transform

2025

A Gaussian splat processing CLI. Merged PR #29 adding standalone HTML viewer output from .ply files with camera and target options, and merged PR #65 adding box and sphere filtering of Gaussians. Also proposed Flash K-Means GPU clustering for splat compression (#186).

Community

Friends of AI

Mar 2026 – Present

Founder and Organizer

A community of about 70 AI practitioners and enthusiasts that I founded and run. We meet for weekly Saturday sessions on research paper reading and knowledge sharing, with 30+ sessions so far, plus a Luma calendar and an occasional newsletter.