Krishnaraj Venkatesan
Staff Engineer, Chargebee · AI Platforms & Distributed Systems
Chennai, India krishnarajsiva@gmail.com linkedin.com/in/kriznaraj github.com/kriznaraj kriznaraj.github.io
Summary
Staff Engineer with 13+ years building AI platforms, distributed systems and billing infrastructure. I set technical direction across Chargebee’s AI org and architect for its 8-engineer platform team, with six product teams building on what we ship. Architect of Chargebee Copilot — now a fully autonomous agent system resolving L2+ support tickets — and of the MCP server that took the platform to merchants, adopted by 100+ live sites. Earlier, architected a job framework running 40M+ jobs/day, which Chargebee’s core billing still runs on. Currently own Billing Desk, an AI-first receivables product.
Selected impact
- 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
Experience
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.
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.
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.
Core stack
Java, Spring Boot, Python, Node.js, React · LangGraph, LangChain, MCP, RAG, agent orchestration, evals · Kafka, MySQL, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis · AWS, Docker, Splunk · OAuth 2.0, RBAC, REST API design · event-driven architecture, idempotency, multi-tenancy, observability
Education
B.Tech, Information Technology, 2012
College of Engineering, Guindy (CEG), Chennai
Recognition & service
- 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
Side projects
- Illam — home management app (expenses, investments, documents and reminders), built and shipped end-to-end; in private beta at illam.co.in.
- BumbleB — operations app built pro bono for an NGO: task and employee management, teaching and project coordination.
- Revmonk — co-founded a real-time lead intelligence platform on AWS, Supabase, PostgreSQL and SendGrid. Owned the full stack; reached 50+ trial users and 2 paying customers before sunsetting on operating cost.