Founding engineer on a GenAI education platform

The brief

KRISHAI brought me in as the founding engineer to build evolvue.ai for Krish Naik, whose AI and data science education network reaches over 1.5 million subscribers. There was no existing engineering team and no existing codebase — just a founder with a clear sense of where the business was losing time.

Being the first engineer means the interesting question is never "how do I implement this ticket". It is "which of these problems, solved this week, changes the business the most".

How I worked with the founder

I worked directly with the founder to translate business bottlenecks into working software, and owned product, backend, frontend and infrastructure end to end. Most of the highest-value work turned out to be operational: processes being run by hand that could be run by a system.

The prototypes that removed those manual operations helped double company revenue. Not because the code was clever, but because shipping them took weeks rather than quarters, so the founder could see whether an idea worked while it still mattered.

Speed without the usual bill

Moving fast as the only engineer is easy right up until the first production incident. I kept speed and reliability together deliberately rather than trading one for the other.

• Strict testing protocols for data integrity under high traffic — education launches are spiky by nature
• AWS infrastructure provisioned so environments were reproducible, not hand-tuned
• CI/CD that made releases routine instead of an event someone had to be awake for

What I took from it

A year as employee number one on the engineering side is the most complete version of the job: product decisions, architecture, the frontend a user actually touches, and the pager. It is why I can be handed a vague problem and come back with something running.