Hi there! I am Praveen.
The longer version: from software engineer in 2012 to CTO at Egen.AI, the platforms and teams I have built since, and the scars I picked up.
I’m the CTO at Egen.AI. I build AI platforms, and I build them agentically. I didn’t read that somewhere. I’ve shipped it, broken it, and shipped it again. And I’ve measured the difference. I’m still hands-on: in the architecture, and in the code.
I joined Egen in the fall of 2012 as a Software Engineer. Over the years I built the engineering organization from null into a team of 400+ engineers, architects, and product owners, working with enterprise and startup clients across Industrial IoT, Retail, Grocery Delivery, Healthcare, and Events. The one trait I’ve pushed hardest into those teams is an obsession with constant learning and experimentation, on top of Cloud Native Engineering Principles.
Working with startups and enterprises at the same time is deliberate. Startups let me try new ideas and build conviction; the scale and complexity of enterprise problems expose the blind spots worth fixing before a startup ever hits them. I’ve started projects by hiring and mentoring a handful of engineers, then grown them into 10+ teams running a distributed platform. I’ve also gotten things badly wrong. Those became lessons learned, and they’re the ones worth talking about.
Circa 2014 I became overconfident with my storytelling skills and started teaching modern technical stacks: JavaScript frameworks, Java, Microservices, AWS, Azure, Kafka, Docker, and Kubernetes. 8,000+ engineers so far. I still run workshops and give talks, both inside Egen and out.
I was born in 1987 (do the math) in a small district in central India (Ratlam) and lived there for the first 18 years of my life. I’ve been in love with computers since I was 14. I came to the USA in 2010 to study at the University of Florida, graduated with a Master’s in Computer Engineering in 2012, and have been in Chicago ever since.
Go Gators 🐊; from the cold winters of Chicago ❄️.
I’ve never enjoyed theoretical learning. Everything I know came from building things and breaking them. Away from the terminal I have a creative streak: vector graphics, music, and video editing. The logo, colors, and type on this site are mine. When that side meets a technical architecture, the explanations get a lot better.
If you’d like to get hold of me, you can contact me here.
Speaker Bio (in a serious tone)⌗
Praveen Salitra is the CTO at Egen.AI, living in Chicagoland. He works both sides of agentic AI: agentic engineering, putting agents to work across the software development lifecycle, and agentic platforms, the AI products his teams build for end users. He has been hands-on since 2012 across distributed platforms, microservices, APIs, data pipelines, and infrastructure automation, and built Egen’s engineering organization from a single engineer to more than 400. He has trained over 8,000 engineers on modern technical stacks including Kubernetes, Docker, Terraform, AWS, Azure, and Kafka. He speaks and runs workshops on agentic engineering, cloud-native architecture, and building AI platforms that hold up in production.
