Hi, I'm Krithik.
I love search engines, non-fiction, the Hindu epics, Carnatic music, and the Denis Villeneuve filmography. I build things in my free time, because I found out how fun it is and how alive it makes me feel. Right now I'm at Matic Robots, building robots.
The free-time projects are where my head actually lives. I'm halfway through writing a search engine in Rust, working through Manning's Information Retrieval textbook one chapter at a time. Last week I replaced a serialization library with my own variable-byte encoder and shrank my index by 76%. It also got 50% slower — and I can tell you exactly why.
Before the Rust engine I built filmsearch, a search engine for movies that understands queries like "films about love and space." A founder used it to find a Japanese animated film he couldn't find anywhere else. Still my favorite piece of feedback.
Before that, voyantra — a trip planner where I figured out what an API was, what a backend does, what a database is for. Nothing in it is novel. But it's the project that taught me how to build the things that came after.
And before any of that, a marketing agency in undergrad. $4K a month, seven clients. I shut it down to graduate. It taught me more about how businesses actually work than any class I've ever taken.
While I'm at Matic I've been feeding sensor failure patterns to engineering on my own time, which helped bring crown-module rejection rates from 75% down to under 30%.
In between all of this: PM at Saayam, PM intern at Wurq (ML pose-correction pipeline, latency 800ms → 40ms), and operations associate at ZS Associates owning post-launch optimization for a pharma platform that distributed $32M in product a year (cut 35% of support tickets, saved $1M). I trained as an engineer at VNIT in India, then did a Master's in Engineering Management at Northeastern. Most of the engineering I actually use I taught myself.
Looking for the next thing. Specifically: a startup doing what Keith Rabois calls the formula — finding a large, highly fragmented industry with low NPS, and vertically integrating a solution to simplify the value product. That's the kind of company I want to sit inside. Ideally somewhere I can sit between customers and engineering and translate one into the other.
what I'm doing now
- building robots on the production line at Matic, and feeding test failure data back to engineering on the side.
- writing a search engine in Rust, chapter by chapter through Manning's Information Retrieval textbook. Currently on Ch. 6 — TF-IDF and ranking.
- writing about what I learn each day, mostly so I have to actually understand it.
- looking for the next thing — ideally a startup where I can sit between customers and engineering, build the thing that bridges them, and ship it.
things I've built
A search engine for films that understands queries like "movies about love and space." Custom BM25 from scratch, query relaxation, sentence-transformer zone selection. End-to-end: Scrapy → Postgres → React on Vercel. A startup founder used it to find a Japanese animated film he couldn't find anywhere else — that's still my favorite piece of feedback. code
Working through the Manning IR textbook one chapter at a time, building everything from scratch in Rust. Currently: a positional inverted index over 12K documents with my own VByte encoder. Next: TF-IDF ranking. The goal is to actually understand what Lucene does, not just use it.
Started in undergrad. Got it to $4K/mo with 7 clients. Ran the whole show — Facebook and Instagram ads, sales funnels on ClickFunnels, sales calls, delivery, billing. Closed it to graduate. The most useful thing I've ever done — every later job I've had makes more sense because I had to do payroll once.
A trip planner with real flight and hotel data via the Amadeus API. MERN stack, 100+ commits. This is the project where I figured out what an API actually was — what a backend does, what a database is for, how the frontend talks to either of them. Nothing here is novel; everything here taught me how to build the things that came after. code
A one-day AI hackathon project at the SundAI Club at MIT. The team built a tool that takes hours of conversation audio, finds the moments people laughed, and uses an LLM to summarize the joke or punchline that landed. I was one of about sixteen hackers — turned up, contributed where I could, shipped it inside a day. The kind of thing that reminds you how fast a small team can build something real.
On the production line. Helped engineering diagnose what was going wrong with sensor tests — cameras, infrared, microphones — by feeding them structured failure patterns from the line. Rejection rates went from 75% to under 30%. Not in my job description; I just don't like leaving signal on the floor.
PM intern. Owned the ML pipeline for pose correction on a fitness app — IMU sensor data, training data collection, requirements for a CNN. Inference latency went from 800ms to under 40ms; on-device edge processing cut costs by 28%. The investor liked the work enough that I kept building on his project after the internship ended.
First job out of undergrad. Owned post-launch optimization for a platform that pharma sales reps used to distribute $32M in product a year. Triaged support tickets, found the patterns, shipped the fixes — eliminated 35% of all support volume. Made the case to leadership for optimization over new features and saved $1M.
the through-line
Every project above did the same thing: helped someone solve something that actually mattered to them. The pharma rep needed the platform to just work so she could go sell. The film fan needed the search to understand what she meant, not what she typed. The robot needs to tell the kid from the toaster.
What I bring is people, engineering, and clear thinking — pointed at problems that matter. I figure out what's actually getting in the way, get the right people moving in the same direction, and either build the thing myself or work alongside the people who do.
That's it. That's the whole job.
other things
I read a lot, mostly non-fiction. Right now: Ramesh Menon's modern rendering of the Mahabharata. Recently finished his Ramayana and Krishna: The Blue God. Last year I went through Walter Isaacson's The Innovators and Neil Postman's Amusing Ourselves to Death. Full list on Goodreads.
Played chess for the team at VNIT and at Northeastern. Still play, badly, online.