Staff Engineer at Chargebee

Krishnaraj Venkatesan

I build AI platforms, distributed systems and the billing infrastructure underneath them — from a job framework running tens of millions of operations a day, to the autonomous agent platform that resolves Chargebee’s L2+ support queries and now ships to merchants as an MCP server.

I set technical direction across Chargebee’s AI org and architect for its 8-engineer platform team. Six product teams — support, onboarding, billing, integrations, receivables and docs — build on what we ship. I also own Receivables end to end with a team of four, working toward a fully autonomous collections agent.

Chennai, India13+ years in engineeringEx-Founder, Revmonk

40M+ Billing jobs/day on the framework I architected
30% Support ticket inflow removed by Copilot
100+ Live sites running on our MCP server
6 Product teams building on the AI platform

What I'm building now

An agent platform, and an AI-first take on receivables

My last year at Chargebee has been about turning a single assistant into a platform other teams — and now merchants — build on, then pointing that platform at a new product surface.

Platform engineering · Chargebee

Making the platform fast, and the stack easy to run

Cut job queue wait time 40–60%, with critical jobs down to sub-second, by restructuring runners and separating priority work from internal work. Moved every non-DB-backed task onto the durable jobs framework so nothing is lost on deploy, and added pick-up-delay vs execution-time observability to show where latency actually goes.

On the developer side: Dockerised every UI and backend service, so the whole stack boots in a couple of commands against any environment — plus a setup CLI, a dedicated predev CDN, and read replicas in EU and AU.

  • Docker
  • Job orchestration
  • Read replicas
  • Observability
  • DevEx

Chargebee Hackathon · two-time winner

First place in 2026 — and in 2020

2026: rebuilt how Chargebee’s engineering teams handle code management — an AI-powered workflow with skills that compress the development lifecycle.

2020: Chargebee as a merchant subscription aggregator driven by voice as the primary input — six years before the agent platform, and the same bet: the interface should adapt to the person, not the other way round.

  • 🏆 1st place ×2
  • Developer experience
  • Voice interfaces

Foundations

The systems underneath

Earlier platform work that the current AI systems are built on. Each is written up in depth — problem, architecture, scale and my actual role — in the case studies.

Data infrastructure · 2023

Common Schema Migration

Led a global schema migration unifying and replicating shared customer and account data across geo-distributed shards — improving consistency, isolation and regional failover readiness across production.

  • Sharding
  • Multi-region
  • Zero-downtime migration

Outside work

Things I build on my own time.

Product · private beta

Illam

A home management app, built and shipped end-to-end at illam.co.in — expense management, investment tracking, and a home of record for important documents, reminders and events. Currently in private beta behind sign-in.

Pro bono · NGO

BumbleB

An operations app built for an NGO — daily task and employee management, plus teaching and project tracking and coordination for their team. Runs behind their team sign-in.

Startup · co-founder, sunset

Revmonk

Co-founded a real-time lead intelligence platform — visitor tracking, enrichment and automated outreach, on AWS, Supabase, PostgreSQL and SendGrid. I owned the whole stack. Reached 50+ trial users and 2 paying customers before we sunset it on operating cost.

Experience

13+ years, three companies

  1. Staff Engineer · Chargebee

    Sep 2017 – Present · Chennai, India

    • Set technical direction across the AI org, architecting for an 8-engineer platform team (4 senior, 4 junior). Six product teams — support, onboarding, billing, integrations, receivables and docs — build on what we ship. Own Receivables end to end with a team of four.
    • Built Chargebee’s AI agents platform and Backstage, the control plane for managing, evaluating and observing every agent in production — per-step traces, latency and token-consumption monitoring, evals over recorded interactions, and role-based admin actions.
    • Took the platform external as an MCP server, published in the Claude marketplace and secured with OAuth 2.0 — pre-registration, refresh tokens, per-agent client credentials, user-level consent, and tenant × user/API/IP rate limiting. Adopted organically by 100+ live sites, with merchants composing custom MCP servers from our toolsets.
    • Architected and own Chargebee Copilot, evolving it from a RAG assistant into a fully autonomous A2A agent system that resolves L2+ support queries without human involvement. Decoupled Copilot Skills from MCP servers and moved permissions onto user RBAC so any team can contribute skills.
    • Leading Billing Desk, an AI-first receivables product — dunning sequence automation on a generic workflow executor, a collector queue backed by Kafka event sync with reconciliation and retry, and precomputed aggregates that keep list pages off expensive runtime queries.
    • Cut job queue wait time 40–60% (critical jobs to sub-second) by restructuring runners, isolating priority work, and moving non-durable tasks onto the DB-backed jobs framework. Built a separate job system for agent inference (1M+/day), keeping model-provider latency isolated from core billing.
    • Dockerised the entire UI and backend stack so it boots in a couple of commands against any environment, and added a setup CLI, predev CDN and EU/AU read replicas.
    • Architected the distributed job framework Chargebee’s core billing runs on — subscriptions, invoicing, renewals, dunning — now 40M+ operations/day with idempotency, retries, throttling, telemetry and SLA alerting.
    • Designed and led the ERP & CRM integration platform, a plugin-based architecture that cut integration effort 80% and shipped 10+ connectors. Served as NetSuite AR subject-matter expert.
    • Led a global schema migration unifying customer and account data across geo-distributed shards for consistency and regional failover.
    • Core member of the API Review Council and contributor to senior engineering hiring panels and mentorship.
  2. Senior Software Developer · Travel Republic

    Sep 2014 – Aug 2017 · Bangalore, India

    • Built and maintained backend microservices powering flight and hotel bookings for one of the UK’s largest travel platforms.
    • Owned the manage-bookings and user dashboard modules, driving performance and UX improvements.
    • Migrated legacy APIs to REST services and introduced structured logging and error telemetry as part of the platform modernisation.
  3. Software Engineer · Bally Technologies

    Feb 2013 – Sep 2014 · Bangalore, India

    • Built reusable WPF components and UI libraries for enterprise casino platforms.
    • Developed internal marketing and voucher distribution tools used by operations teams across the US and APAC.

Tech

What I build with

Deliberately short. These are the things I’ve made architectural decisions about in production — not everything I’ve touched.

AI & agent systems

  • LangGraph
  • LangChain
  • MCP
  • OpenAI
  • Anthropic
  • Pinecone
  • RAG pipelines
  • Agent orchestration
  • Evals

Languages & frameworks

  • Java
  • Spring Boot
  • Apache Camel
  • Python
  • Node.js
  • React

Data & messaging

  • MySQL
  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB
  • Kafka
  • Redis

Platform & operations

  • AWS
  • Docker
  • Splunk
  • Superset

Security & API

  • OAuth 2.0
  • RBAC
  • Rate limiting
  • REST API design

Architecture

  • Event-driven design
  • Idempotency patterns
  • Multi-tenancy
  • Observability

Domain

  • Subscription billing
  • Accounts receivable
  • NetSuite

Education & recognition

Background

Education

College of Engineering, Guindy (CEG)

B.Tech, Information Technology · 2012

Chennai, Tamil Nadu. I stay involved as a volunteer with the CEG alumni network.

Recognition & service

Beyond shipping

  • Chargebee Hackathon — two-time winner (2020, 2026). 2026: an AI-powered code management workflow for engineering teams. 2020: Chargebee as a merchant subscription aggregator driven by voice as the primary input.
  • API Review Council — core member, driving API consistency, backward compatibility and governance across every public and internal API
  • Webinar — Behind Chargebee Copilot, on its architecture and GenAI foundations
  • Engineering hiring committee — senior-level interview panels
  • Mentorship — coaching engineers moving into platform and AI-focused roles, and advising early-stage startups

Contact

Let’s talk

I’m open to Principal and Staff+ engineering roles where the work is platform architecture, AI systems and developer infrastructure at scale.

I also enjoy mentoring engineers moving into platform and AI work, talking about AI systems with teams figuring them out, and swapping notes with early-stage founders — along with podcasts and panels. Always happy to have those conversations.