Praveen Kumar A
Backend Engineer - Distributed Systems and AI Infrastructure
Summary
Backend Engineer with 4+ years of experience building distributed systems, scalable backend platforms, and AI infrastructure. Lead backend development and architecture for core components of Zia Agents, Zoho's agent development platform, enabling scalable agentic workflows and multi-agent orchestration. Focused on event-driven systems, microservices, fault tolerance, and reliable execution of production AI workloads.
Work Experience
Software Engineer
Zoho Corporation - Zia Agents
Leading backend engineering and owning the architecture of core components of Zia Agents, building distributed execution infrastructure for production AI workloads.
- Architected an event-driven agent execution platform that decoupled workflow processing into independently scalable stages, increasing throughput 5× and supporting 500K+ agent executions daily across data centers with the same machine footprint.
- Designed fault-tolerant execution with step-level persistence, enabling failure recovery, resumable workflows, and retry-safe execution without restarting entire agent runs.
- Architected a multi-agent collaboration framework supporting workflow-based orchestration, agent handoffs, and session continuity across collaborating agents.
- Designed execution observability infrastructure with ordered step tracking, execution timelines, and metrics pipelines, making previously opaque multi-step AI workflows traceable.
- Engineered a tiered storage architecture for execution data, reducing database storage overhead by 60% while retaining the persistence required for observability, recovery, and long-running workflows.
- Designed a multi-tenant scheduling architecture with per-organization concurrency limits, dynamic burst allocation, and fair resource distribution to mitigate noisy-neighbor contention and prevent high-volume tenants from monopolizing shared LLM execution capacity.
- Led the development of core backend APIs and integrations connecting client applications, internal services, and platform capabilities.
Software Engineer
Zoho Corporation
Progressed from UI development to full-stack engineering, owning data visualization systems and key platform integrations for Catalyst QuickML, a no-code MLOps platform.
- Designed and owned a dual-path data processing architecture combining Apache Spark and in-memory execution, improving visualization performance and flexibility when working with large-scale datasets.
- Developed reusable no-code ML pipeline templates and REST APIs for machine learning model lifecycle management, enabling streamlined ML workflows and cross-data-center synchronization.
Education
B.E. in Electronics and Communication Engineering
Thiagarajar College of Engineering
Skills
- Distributed Systems
- Microservices
- TypeScript
- RabbitMQ
- Agentic Workflows
- Scala
- Redis
- LLM Optimization