Hands-on technology leadership for teams shipping hard things.
I'm Vagmi Mudumbai — a CTO and DevOps architect with 24+ years building high-performance systems and the teams that ship them. I help startups and scale-ups move faster without trading away security, scalability, or maintainability.
Philosophy
Velocity is free now. Direction is the new scarcity.
The adult in the room
AI agents have commoditized code generation, but they haven't solved engineering. The bottleneck isn't typing anymore; it's taste, architecture, and decision-making. You don't need a $250k/year full-time executive to guide a small team. You need high-leverage, strategic oversight to ensure security, scalability, and the right vendor choices.
Velocity vs. quality
AI lets junior developers output code at senior velocities. Without architectural guardrails, that speed compounds into an unmaintainable "big ball of mud." I provide the necessary friction so speed doesn't quietly kill your product's longevity.
Hands-on leadership
I don't just draw diagrams. I write the foundational scaffolding in Rust and Go, set up the CI/CD pipelines, and establish the golden paths that let your team, and their AI agents, ship safely and fast.
Capabilities
Where I do my best work
Advisory CTO
DevOps Architecture
Pragmatic AI Engineering
Team Building
Legacy Modernization
Audit & Due Diligence
Workshop
Builder Workshop: from idea to deployed prototype
A one-day, hands-on workshop for aspiring entrepreneurs. Learn how to use AI-assisted coding to build, secure, and deploy a real product on Cloudflare. No prior coding experience required.
Engagement models
Ways to work together
I'm also building Urai, an AI voice and agent platform that keeps me shipping against the hardest problems in AI infrastructure: Firecracker microVM sandboxes, V8-in-Rust runtimes for tool execution, real-time voice over WebRTC. Engagements bring those battle-tested architectures to your stack. Predictable pricing, no equity required, pause or cancel anytime.
DevOps Architect
Stability, Security, and Scalability for scale-ups with existing PMF but fragile infrastructure.
- Monthly Infrastructure Audit
- Terraform/IaC Refactoring
- K8s Upgrades & Maintenance
- CI/CD Pipeline Optimization
Advisory CTO
Strategic leadership for early-stage startups. Your veteran technical co-founder, part-time.
- Technical Roadmap Planning
- Vendor/Stack Selection
- Hiring & Vetting (First 5 Engineers)
- Code Reviews & RFC Validation
- Weekly Sync + Board Attendance
Pragmatic AI Engineering
A scoped engagement for teams building production AI systems: harnesses, sandboxes, private routing, agentic search.
- Agent Harness & Guardrail Engineering
- Secure Sandboxed Code Execution (Firecracker)
- Private Model Routing & LLM Gateways
- Agentic Search & Retrieval Systems
- Platform Integrations & Team Roadmap
Why engage this way?
Immediate impact
Skip the three-month hiring process. I integrate with your team and start delivering value from day one.
No equity cost
Get senior technical leadership without diluting your cap table. Ideal for early-stage validation.
Flexible commitment
Scale up or down as your needs change. Pause or cancel with a month’s notice.
Not sure what you need?
Every team is different. If you need a custom combination, like a heavy initial audit followed by ongoing advisory, we can tailor a package for you.
Let's discuss your situationSelected work
Things I've built and shipped
A book and reference implementation on building rootless containers from scratch using Bash. Deep dive into Linux namespaces, cgroups, and overlay filesystems.
Urai Voice
CTO & Co-founder
Building a developer-first voice AI platform for natural, real-time, interruptible conversations. The core voice service is written in Rust, utilizing Stunner for WebRTC and hosted on GKE with CloudNativePG and Barman for resilience.
Thiri
Platform Architecture (Urai)
Built a secure, API-driven Firecracker runtime for AI agents to execute ephemeral Python code. Engineered 'Thiri Linux', a custom Alpine-based distro with a specialized kernel (netfilter/conntrack) to support nested containers.
AICrete
Infrastructure & Platform Engineering
Migrated infrastructure from Heroku to AWS EC2 with Compute Savings Plans. Built a custom Go-based CLI developer platform for log viewing and environment management. Integrated cloud-based Django dispatch system with legacy on-prem Windows systems using Go.
Tunecore
Platform Architecture
Architected the split of a 10-year Rails monolith into microservices. Built high-performance distribution services in Go and AWS Lambda, handling $1bn+ in artist payouts.
Moove
Location Services
Optimized route planning and location tracking for employee mobility. Migrated from Google Maps SDK to OSRM, implementing WebSocket-based real-time tracking.
Let's build something durable.
Whether you need an architectural audit, a DevOps overhaul, or steady strategic leadership, I'm happy to talk it through.
Schedule a free 30-minute call