Vagmi Mudumbai
CTO & Co-founder, Urai AI
Fredericton, NB, Canada 🇨🇦
Technology leader with 24+ years of experience building high-performance software and the elite teams that ship it. Currently architecting Urai AI, a Rust-based unified, programmable serverless platform for deploying voice and chat-based AI agents. Previously, as CTO of Sedin Technologies, I scaled a global engineering organization to $18M ARR across four countries and incubated EAM360, an enterprise solution even used at US national laboratories. Beyond my own ventures, I serve as a consulting CTO for international brands in logistics, ad-tech and large-scale retail. I bridge high-level architecture with production-grade code, leading from the trenches to deliver at scale.
> Experience
Urai AI Corp.
I engineered the solution, the architecture, and the infrastructure from scratch.
I discovered that LLMs are better at writing code than composing tool calls. I first experimented with a Lua sandbox to quickly validate the hypothesis. I found that it worked quite well. The next was to make it work with popular languages that are part of LLM training sets (Python and TypeScript). I discovered the most promising isolation mechanisms to be Firecracker-powered microVMs and v8 Isolates.
So I designed a secure code sandbox at two levels to run LLM-generated code: a fast serverless JavaScript runtime that launches custom execution contexts in 20ms, and a slower but more feature-complete VM that cold-boots to a runnable state in 2 seconds.
To validate this serverless runtime, I first integrated it into our voice agent platform: define agents with prompts, write tools in simple TypeScript that run on our sandbox, and use these agents on phone or the web. I integrated with Gemini Live API, OpenAI Realtime and Eleven Labs for the STT, LLM and TTS pipeline. I built both the webrtc frontend including handling timing events for the WebRTC RTP stream and the much more straight forward bidirectional streaming for Twilio.
I built a chat client to surface our agentic capabilities using serverless tool calling, coding agent and hybrid search system for grounding LLMs. I also built Urai Portal to run open source local models along side cloud models and mix and match them in the same AI conversation. This makes Urai Chat a category definer.
Nirai Tech Inc.
I offered Advisory CTO and DevOps consulting practice that spanned scoping, technology and implementation roadmaps, architecture due diligence, and hands-on platform work for early-stage and growth-stage teams. I also built a AI music product suite.
Sedin Technologies Corp
I was the CTO of Sedin Technologies. During my tenure, Sedin grew from 130 people / $2M aggregated revenue to 500 people / $18M revenue.
I owned the P&L for the product studio and was the Division Head of the high-end advisory division Tarka Labs.
I created a high talent density team to drive organizational transformation across Sedin.
I recruited and managed a strong 25 member team of senior engineers, designers, product managers,
and people champions across Canada, the US, Poland, and India bringing in ~$3M ARR from this division.
Tarka Labs also acted as the engineering and design org for other Sedin divisions (e.g. EAM360).
I led the skunkworks initiatives that produced EAM360, Kili, Klstr, and several open-source projects.
I worked on a variety of domains from Logistics, Retail, Media Tech and EdTech.
Independent Consultant
Served as CTO at Reduce Data building an ML-driven demand-side Real Time Bidding platform. For Qube Cinema, I architected Keypass - a cloud-based DCI key-delivery system for their global projector fleet.
Thoughtworks
Lead consultant at Thoughtworks, a delivery-oriented consultancy known for its agile methodologies and XP practices. Delivered performance-analytics and assortment-planning systems for GruppoPAM, an Italian retail chain.
Dharana Software / Artha42 Software
I built a boutique software consultancy that specialized in building Ruby on Rails applications for startups and SMBs. Our clients included early-stage startups and enterprises from India, US, Australia and Europe. I was responsible for the technical architecture, growing the team, project delivery, and client relationships.
SAP Labs India
I was an architect in the Emerging Solutions division. We built frameworks such as ORM and developer tools that integrated with Visual Studio and Eclipse to build business software such as CRM and service desk systems. Implemented an OSGi-style Flex framework that mimicked OSGi semantics inside the SAP toolchain.
SlashSupport
Led a team that offered development support for the InstallShield suite.
Bajaj Allianz General Insurance
Developed in-house productivity tools in VB and SQL Server.
> Open Source
I built Paagan to let AI agents work on database level tasks knowing that I can version control them like code. Paagan is a lightweight Rust CLI that manages multiple local PostgreSQL instances over Docker. It supports version pinning, isolated data dirs, and point-in-time recovery.
Built a minimal JavaScript runtime with Rust and V8. I built it for my Confoo conference talk on how JS runtimes work, featuring a custom event loop and ES module support.
I wrote a book capturing my research experiences building a rootless container implementation using standard Linux utilities and Bash.
This is my quest to find the most cost-effective yet production quality HA Kubernetes implementation. So after much hair pulling, I built a cost-effective ($20/mo) production-quality HA-K8S cluster setup on Hetzner Cloud including a pre-cached K3s image for fast deployment with Cilium CNI.
I built a Rust procedural macro to generate named, reusable structs from SQL queries at compile time using SQLx.
> Projects
Nirai Tech Inc.
Opinionated AWS based Platform that offers the same developer experience as Heroku but with the cost advantages of AWS.
I used this across client engagements to offer platform engineering as a service. It offers a three-tier VPC, bastion, RDS Postgres, ECS-on-EC2 (~3x cheaper than Fargate) and ALB with managed TLS.
It includes a Rust CLI over the AWS SDK for log tailing, config management, one-off ECS jobs/exec, SSM-backed config, and DB tunneling over AWS auth.
AI Series-A Startup — Heroku → AWS migration
Migrated production infra from Heroku to AWS EC2 on Compute Savings Plans. This was primarily driven by high-compute workloads and SoC 2 requirements that were not commercially viable on Heroku.
Established dev/prod isolation and CI/CD for building, testing, and deploying images to ECS. Built a Go developer CLI for a Heroku-like DX to make it easy for the development team to operate the service.
I also helped integrate their cloud based python django system with a on-prem windows based production planning ERP system. I built a Go based Windows service that tunnels connections to the Python/Django cloud app through corporate firewalls to offer a seamless experience for their end-users.
Sedin Technologies — Advisory
I was the technical partner to the sales and solution teams. I helped in positioning services, acting as a closer on several of their key engagements, running customer discovery, preparing technology showcases, and serving as project liaison on key accounts.
AI Music Similarity Search System
Custom semantic music model based on the HuBERT architecture. Trained a bespoke embedder with pooling to power track-similarity search, and finetuned lightweight classifier heads — freezing the lower HuBERT layers — for genre, instrument, and other attribute classification.
Sedin Technologies Corp
EAM360 — Enterprise Asset Management
This started as an improptu demo during a client visit in Switzerland. This grew into a full EAM product line. Now in production at Region of Peel, AV Nackawic, Delco Water, Marina Bay Sands, City of Henderson, and at a US national laboratory via a partner's FedRAMP-cleared enclave.
Tunecore
This started as a one-person transformation engagement. I inherited a 10-year-old Rails codebase run by 6 junior and bootcamp engineers after the prior team left. Over half the tests failed, coverage was under 30%, no CI/CD.
I embedded as an IC alongside customer support and started doing post mortems and fixing underlying issues that the existing team had been papering over with data patches. I earned enough management trust to convince the CTO to adopt a partner-plus growth model. I then helped recruit and grow their own team in parallel and grew our engagement to 15 billable engineers opening up opportunities for other divisions in Sedin as well. I setup CI/CD and Terraform, moved workloads from bare EC2 to ECS, shipped the Rails 4 to Rails 6 upgrade. I rewrote the Rails distribution service in Go resulting in 70% infra cost reduction. Along with the CTO, we introduced the Spotify squads/tribes/chapters structure.
When Believe acquired Tunecore, I setup a transcoding system to transcoded 8M tracks into the Believe system in under a month using a dedicated EC2 box for steady state plus a Lambda with a statically compiled FFmpeg layer to absorb the burst.
We setup business level monitoring with grafana to visually radiate the metrics that affected the Apple and Spotify partner scorecards to maintain Tunecore’s gold partner status. At its peak, this account contributed to 80% of the divisions’s revenue ($2M).”
Moove
I wrote the route planner in Go to reduce the route planning time from 30 minutes to less than a minute.
I now get to sit in an air-conditioned room for most of my day rather than in the heat of the frontdesk coordinating with cabs.
— Nanjundaiah (Planner)
Moove is an employee-transportation platform for shift-based workforces in Bangalore. We swapped Google Maps API for a self-hosted OSRM engine running on OpenStreetMap extracts of Bangalore, We also rewrote the live location service from Rails to Go over WebSockets for driver and passenger tracking.
Innovation Projects (Kili) Talk ▶
Kili is an AI powered language learning tool. Consumed RSS feeds, transcribed with Whisper, tokenized with NLTK, generated embeddings with SBert, indexed with QDrant, and translated with flan-t5.
Independent Consultant
Reduce Data (Ad Tech)
Demand-side RTB platform with a white-labeled campaign dashboard that let businesses configure campaigns, flight dates, targeting, and creative management end to end. I implemented the ML systems powering the platform: ensemble classifiers (SGD and Random Forest via Weka) for click prediction, and separate models for price prediction. The runtime ran on Java Play and PostgreSQL for campaign state, with a Cassandra click-stream pipeline feeding the training loop.
Qube Cinemas - Keypass
Qube operates digital movie projectors in theaters across South Asia and the US. DCI compliance requires each projector to play only DCPs (Digital Cinema Packages) carrying matching public-key signatures. Keypass is a cloud-based Key Delivery Management system that issues and tracks signing keys for mastering studios worldwide and distributes playback keys to deployed projectors, paired with a C++/Go CLI triggered by each studio during DCP mastering. I owned the architecture and built the cloud-side key management service and its AngularJS dashboard.
Thoughtworks
GruppoPAM - Buyer Dashboard
GruppoPAM is an Italian retail chain. The Buyer Dashboard is a performance-analytics tool that lets merchandisers slice assortment performance across stores and geographies. Teradata and a Java/Spring service handled the heavy analytical lifting; a Rails app served user preferences and report configuration; D3 and Marionette drove the visualization layer on the frontend.
GruppoPAM - Assortment Planning
Replaced GruppoPAM's overnight assortment-planning batch: an Oracle PL/SQL and Java system that took six hours to compute profitability profiles across the catalog, which made real-time what-if analysis impractical. I rewrote the engine in Clojure with Neo4j handling the graph expansions over category relationships and PostgreSQL holding contractual data, bringing the six-hour batch down to 120 seconds. Buyers could now run what-if scenarios directly in the system instead of maintaining parallel spreadsheet models.
Dharana Software / Artha42 Software
KeepRecruiting
SaaS applicant tracking product, broadly similar to lever.co — candidate pipelines, job postings, collaborative hiring, and recruiter workflows. Built on Rails.
AuditionMagic
HTML5 based in-video tagging solution.
Apollo HealthHiway
White-labeled PHR system with HIS integration.
> Education
- M.Sc (IT) - University of Madras - 2002-2003
- B.Sc (Physics) - University of Madras - 1998-2001