SAN FRANCISCO · AI / ROBOTICS / SYSTEMS
I’m Akshay Chalana, co-founder and CEO of Saphira. I work at the intersection of AI agents, engineering systems, and the infrastructure needed to reason about complex physical products.
01 / ABOUT
My work has moved through hardware reliability at Tesla, ML infrastructure at Meta and Apple, high-throughput trading systems at Citadel Securities, and now AI-native engineering at Saphira.
The common thread is building dependable systems in domains where complexity and correctness matter.
02 / SELECTED EXPERIENCE
Built and led the product and engineering organization for an AI-native engineering platform used across robotics, autonomy, automotive, aerospace, and industrial products. Deployed with teams including 1X, Dexterity, and Raise Robotics; raised $xM through Y Combinator and beyond.
Led roadmaps, mentored engineers, and owned high-reliability front-office trading systems across the software lifecycle, consolidating legacy applications and enabling roughly 1,000× growth in daily trade throughput.
Built distributed systems and low-latency analytics infrastructure for moving, processing, and understanding ML experiment data.
Designed and implemented the ONNX opset version converter for evolving model operators.
Built software and firmware for hardware reliability testing and engineering test-data visualization.
03 / TECHNICAL WORK
A home for technical work that is easier to understand through code, diagrams, and results than through résumé bullets.
CASE STUDY · FORTHCOMING
What we learned building agents that reason across requirements, architecture, failure analyses, tests, standards, and simulation outputs.
In preparationEXPERIMENT · IN PROGRESS
Exploring how system context and simulation access can help an agent identify what could break and construct meaningful evaluations.
Work in progressWRITING · OPEN SLOT
This site is intentionally small. Substantive technical artifacts will replace this placeholder as they are ready.
Coming next04 / CONTACT
I’m always glad to compare notes with people building in AI, robotics, simulation, and complex engineering systems.