Software architect and founder · Hyderabad, India
Karthik Upadrasta
I design systems that cannot go down, and I still write the code.
I spent fifteen years at Citi building trade-processing, custody and regulatory platforms, finishing as a Senior Vice President leading a 50-person engineering organization across India, the US and the UK.
Since 2023 I have been building AI products hands-on: agentic workflows, retrieval-augmented generation, evaluation and guardrails, taken from a blank page to production.
Selected work
- 15 years at Citi
- Rose to Senior Vice President. Ran a manager-of-managers organization of 50 people with a $10MM budget across three countries.
- Regulatory platforms
- Designed the Infinity Regulatory Platform and led the next-generation Corporate Actions architecture through senior review.
- Trade processing
- Built a straight-through-processing trade gateway from scratch and led the global trade-processing function.
- Founder, GenZ Technologies
- AI products for banking and enterprise: reconciliation and natural-language query on Kafka and Java, and a RAG platform with traceable citations.
Expertise
- Distributed systems and event-driven microservices on Kafka
- Multi-tenant SaaS and cloud architecture on AWS
- LLM agents, RAG, evaluation and guardrails in production
- Payments, custody, regulatory reporting, SWIFT, ISO 20022, FIX
Writing
- Building AI Agents That Don’t Forget, Don’t Hallucinate, and Don’t Lose Their State
AI engineering
- I Built AI That Reads Hundreds of Pages of Medical Records. Here’s What I Learned.
AI engineering
- I Worked on Applying GenAI to Vendor Risk Management. Here’s Why It Is Harder Than It Looks.
AI engineering
- 6 Ways to Give an AI Agent Long-Term Memory (With Python Code)
AI engineering
- The Seven Ways Startups Die
Startups
- STAR Gets You to Mid-Level. Four Upgrades Get You to Senior.
Careers
Education and certifications
- MS, New Jersey Institute of Technology
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
- Project Management Professional (PMP)