--- title: "Akshay Balaji - Founders office - Product & Operations in Tamil Nadu | Tal" description: "Meet Akshay Balaji, Founders office - Product & Operations @ Contrails AI based in Tamil Nadu. AI stack includes claude, deepseek, and gemini." image: "https://tal.club/meet/akshay-balaji/share-image" --- # Akshay Balaji on Tal ## Headline Founders office \- Product & Operations @ Contrails AI ## About I live by Feynman's rule: "if you can't explain it simple terms, you haven't understood it\." 7\+ years overall — the last 4\+ in early\-stage AI companies, testing that rule in the field, one layer of the product at a time\. Contrails AI \(AI\-native trust & safety\) \| Founder's Office: designed and delivered a 3\-month government pilot that converted into a 2\-year contract; built the human\-in\-the\-loop LLM pipeline behind it \(10 → 100 posts/day\) and the intelligence our AEs go to market with\. Loop AI \(AI coworkers\) \| 3 roles in 2 years\. General Manager: ran P&L and GTM for Balance, took it 0 → $2M ARR in 9 months as the market's highest\-priced product, technical closer on $250K\+ ACV deals\. Pod Owner: onboarded 50\+ enterprise groups, cut onboarding from 90 → 21 days, turned a cancellation into an expansion\. Customer Success Engineer: fixed the reconciliation pipeline with SQL, dbt, and shipped PRs \(35% → 100% success\)\. HyperVerge \(AI KYC\): where it started; on the support desk, scaling SBI's video\-KYC platform 10x \(400 → 4,000 calls/day\) and lifting first\-contact resolution from 10% → 40%\. The pattern underneath all of it: do the work manually until you understand it, automate what you've learned, then productize it\. I've debugged the product, onboarded the customer, and carried the number; which means I can explain the same product to a support queue, a platform engineer, any customer, a CFO and a VC without a translator in the room\. Open to roles at the intersection of product, GTM, and solutions engineering; where I can bridge the gap between customers, engineers, and business outcomes\. ## Location Tamil Nadu ## AI stack claude deepseek gemini langchain langgraph langsmith ## Work experience Founders office \- Product & Operations at Contrails AI, Dec 2025 \- Jul 2026 · 8 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, I led product strategy, threat intelligence architecture, and pilot delivery for an AI‑native trust & safety platform\. I joined Contrails at the seed stage to help build and deliver the company's first government pilot\. The work was fast, ambiguous, and high‑stakes\. Key achievements: • Designed & delivered a 3‑month Ministry of Information & Broadcasting pilot — a dual‑engine threat pipeline \(static watchlists \+ dynamic NLP monitoring\) with a client platform and RBAC\. Converted to a 2‑year contract\. • Ran threat identification, ingestion, and legal‑violation mapping manually to find bottlenecks\. Then automated each workflow slice with LLM tooling, building a Human‑in‑the‑Loop pipeline that boosted throughput from 10 → 100 posts/day across 4 platforms\. • Built an RSS‑based AI agent tracking global deepfake and impersonation trends\. Led a 2‑person OSINT team, arming AEs with tailored intelligence — pitch decks, pilot proposals, and SOWs — before cold outreach\. General Manager at Loop AI, Jan 2025 \- Aug 2025 · 8 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, I ran P&L, roadmap, and GTM for Balance; a category‑creating reconciliation product that scaled 0 → $2M ARR as the market's highest‑priced offering\. After 14 months of building the product from the ground up, I was given the reins to take it from a functional product to a commercial category leader\. This meant owning everything — product strategy, delivery model, sales enablement, and revenue growth\. Key achievements: • Established the operating cadence — sprint planning & revenue reviews — aligning engineering, product, and GTM around delivery and growth\. Delivered first paying customer, first corporate mandate, and first self‑serve onboarding\. • Technical closer on $200K–$250K\+ ACV deals\. Built a predictive tax model by manually analyzing high\-volume transaction data across 50\+ customers \(spanning 3–4 marketplaces and 50 U\.S\. states each\), identifying where customers were overpaying or underpaying due to state‑level tax complexity\. Later productized the logic into automated rules that de‑risked the product for finance champions\. • Eliminated buying friction by building a native POS→ERP sync connector into Balance's stack — absorbing a $10/mo competitor cost for customers\. Removed switching hesitation and directly secured two $100K\+ ACV customers\. • Ran 6 design partnerships with CFOs, franchisors, and PE/VC investors — 2 reached the billing stage, including the 0→1 Royalty Fee product\. I went from being the person who knew the product best to the person who had to make it a business\. It was the hardest transition of my career — and the most rewarding\. Pod Owner at Loop AI, Jun 2024 \- Dec 2024 · 7 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, I owned enterprise onboarding, retention, and feature delivery for Balance — owning the end‑to‑end customer journey for 50\+ multi‑location restaurant groups\. This was my transition from being a hands‑on engineer to owning product delivery at scale\. I went from fixing individual customer issues to building systems that prevented them from happening in the first place\. Key achievements: • Onboarded 50\+ customers; from 3‑location independents to 2,000\+ location publicly traded chains; across every major US restaurant format\. Many were recovering from failed prior solutions\. I walked into burning buildings and put out fires\. • Redesigned onboarding \(multi‑call COA creation, book cleanup, ERP configuration\) from 90 → 21 days, tripling quarterly capacity without headcount\. Designed and unlocked self‑serve for 3–4 location groups\. • Turned around a 38‑location premium cafe group from pilot cancellation to expansion in \~3 months — building Lunchbox, Toast, and ezCater integrations on the fly and uncovering a \~$50K marketplace‑facilitator tax overpayment that became a key enterprise proof point\. • Specified features that turned recurring manual ops work into product capability — automated payout‑summary emails, data‑integrity checks, chart‑of‑accounts UI, bulk JE‑status API\. I went from being the person who fixed things to the person who built systems so things didn't break in the first place\. It was the first time I truly understood what "product at scale" meant\. Customer Success Engineer at Loop AI, Nov 2023 \- May 2024 · 7 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, I automated reconciliation workflows and resolved data integrity issues — pushing journal‑entry success from 35% → 100%\. My role was technical customer success at its core\. I sat between customers, operations, and engineering\. I understood the product deeply enough to troubleshoot issues, write SQL, and ship small PRs when needed — but my real value was translating customer pain into actionable fixes that engineering could scale\. Key achievements: • Built a failure‑forecasting system flagging 100–500\+ at‑risk store‑days per push\. Authored RCAs, coordinated retriggers, and operationalized the playbook\. Sustained 100% success post‑handover — the first time the product had ever been truly reliable\. • Wrote SQL & shipped PRs for custom reconciliations — offloading the data engineering team so they pivoted to system‑level fixes\. Cut customer onboarding TAT from \~1‑2 days to same‑day, getting customers live faster\. • Used BigQuery, dbt, and GenAI to resolve a 15% tax over‑reporting issue across the reconciliation engine\. I wasn't a full‑time engineer, but I wasn't just a CS agent either\. I was the bridge between them — and that's exactly where I thrived\. This role taught me that you don't need a formal engineering title to have engineering impact\. Dedicated Support Engineer \- SBI at HyperVerge, Feb 2022 \- Aug 2023 · 1 yr 7 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Collaborated cross\-functionally with development, product, and KAM teams to identify critical software defects and track the implementation of solutions to enhance system performance; reduced customer support issues by 40% and improved average CSAT scores from 3\.5 to 4\.2\. Orchestrated the migration of our CRM activities from JIRA to FreshDesk, revolutionising workflows and embedding automation to boost efficiency and productivity; resulting in a 30% reduction in response times and a 20% increase in team productivity\. In biweekly calls with the product team, I proactively presented production issues, supported by user interviews, metaphase dashboards, and usability testing data\. I propelled the enhancement of system performance and optimised user interactions, resulting in a 25% reduction in customer support issues\. Spearheaded the creation of tools and custom dashboards for our major clients; collaborated across teams to refine products and deliver exceptional support, resulting in a 15% increase in customer satisfaction and a 10% growth in revenue\. Led AI model training and QC tasks in collaboration with data annotation partners, ensuring high\-quality output and timely deliveries, contributing to a 20% reduction in TAT for model upgrade requests\. Consistently achieved the highest CSAT response rate and sustained top\-average CSAT scores in my team over a span of 2 years\. Product Support Engineer at HyperVerge, Sep 2021 \- Feb 2022 · 6 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India, Collaborated cross\-functionally with development, product, and KAM teams to identify critical software defects and track the implementation of solutions to enhance system performance; reduced customer support issues by 40% and improved average CSAT scores from 3\.5 to 4\.2\. Orchestrated the migration of our CRM activities from JIRA to FreshDesk, revolutionising workflows and embedding automation to boost efficiency and productivity; resulting in a 30% reduction in response times and a 20% increase in team productivity\. In biweekly calls with the product team, I proactively presented production issues, supported by user interviews, metaphase dashboards, and usability testing data\. I propelled the enhancement of system performance and optimised user interactions, resulting in a 25% reduction in customer support issues\. Spearheaded the creation of tools and custom dashboards for our major clients; collaborated across teams to refine products and deliver exceptional support, resulting in a 15% increase in customer satisfaction and a 10% growth in revenue\. Led AI model training and QC tasks in collaboration with data annotation partners, ensuring high\-quality output and timely deliveries, contributing to a 20% reduction in TAT for model upgrade requests\. Consistently achieved the highest CSAT response rate and sustained top\-average CSAT scores in my team over a span of 2 years\. Production Support Engineer at Tata Consultancy Services, Jan 2020 \- Jan 2021 · 1 yr 1 mo, Tamil Nadu, India, Spearheaded a team of 5 to set up a production support team for Woolworths retail which would take care of all support activities related to the new application WorkJam\. Responsibilities included: Interacted with the client to understand their expectations from the team and designed an operations module to achieve the same\. Training associates with the required skills to handle support activities\. Preparing Knowledge bases and Knowledge transition modules for new team members who would join in the future\. Assessing the extent of access required for the team and setting up accounts for them in various tools to handle their day to day operations\. Production Support Analyst at Tata Consultancy Services, Nov 2018 \- Jan 2020 · 1 yr 3 mos, Tamil Nadu, India, Successfully handled the support activities of RxConnect the flagship e\-prescription application of CVS Pharmacy\. Created a webpage to efficiently generate and view the Daily Report using Javascript and PHP\. Conducted cross\-functional KT's with the development team for bug fixes which led to a 30% reduction on reported incidents\. Trained 2 new associates to be project ready within 2 weeks\. ## Education Bachelor of Technology \- BTech, Electrical and Electronics Engineering, Vellore Institute of Technology Higher Secondary Educcation\(CBSE\), Physics Chemistry and Mathematics, Chettinad Vidyashram [View the original profile](https://tal.club/meet/akshay-balaji) ```json { "@context": "https://schema.org", "@graph": [ { "@type": "Person", "@id": "https://tal.club/meet/akshay-balaji#person", "name": "Akshay Balaji", "url": "https://tal.club/meet/akshay-balaji", "image": "https://tal.club/meet/akshay-balaji/profile-photo.jpg", "description": "Meet Akshay Balaji, Founders office - Product & Operations @ Contrails AI based in Tamil Nadu. 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