Director of Engineering · Principal Architect · Pune
Pranav Kulkarni
I help engineering teams turn ambitious product bets into reliable systems, clear architecture, and durable execution.
I am a Founding Member and Director of Engineering at Velotio. Previously, I built software at ThoughtWorks, Replay Gaming, and IISER Pune.
My work sits where systems architecture, product judgment, and team leadership meet: AI platforms, distributed backends, data engineering, high-performance computing, and the operating habits that make complex teams dependable.
Field notes
Essays from designing, shipping, and governing software systems at real scale.
All writing
- AI Diligence Is Becoming Technical Diligence
- What Investors Should Ask Before Funding An AI Company
- The Real Cost Of Just Add AI
- Architecture Reviews That Do Not Become Theater
- What I Would Teach A First-Time CTO In 90 Days
- The Enterprise AI Bottleneck Is Not the Model
- AI Safety Is Not a Checkbox: Building Guardrails That Actually Hold
- Multi-Agent Orchestration Patterns That Survived Production
- From Copilot to Cursor to Claude Code: An Honest Migration Log
- Red-Teaming Our Own AI: An Enterprise Safety Playbook
- Small Teams, Big Models: Why 15 Engineers Now Ship Like 200
- Claude Code Changed How My Team Writes Software
- The LLM Security Audit Nobody Wants to Do
- What Broke When We Let Agents Talk to Each Other
- Twelve Engineers, Three Agents, One Platform
- Beyond the LLM Monolith: How Enterprises Capture AI Value
- My Experience with Frontier LLMs: A Comparative Study
- The Agentic Shift: Building AI That Does, Not Just Suggests
- Lessons from Enterprise AI Projects
- Technical Debt in the Age of AI-Assisted Coding
- Observability for LLM-Powered Systems
- The Director's Playbook: Running Engineering at Scale
- Why I Stopped Chasing the Latest Model
- Prompt Engineering is Dead, Long Live System Design
- The Architecture of Trust: Designing Systems Humans Can Audit
- Building for India: Latency, Cost, and Regional Nuance
- Engineering Leadership: Diagnostics, Ambition, and Mentorship
- How I Actually Evaluate LLMs for Production
- Designing Dependable Distributed Systems
- Repository Hygiene for Distributed Infra Teams
- My Developer Environment Blueprint
Follow along
I publish longer field notes here and share shorter observations on X and LinkedIn.
Contact
pranav [at] pranavkulkarni [dot] org — include "Namaskar" in the subject line.
Pune, India