Career Road: Akshay Akula's Work Experience
Career Road is the stretch of the portfolio north of town: Vonar.ai's headquarters with its drones, the hatch down to the Exark drone lab, Private Tech Consulting, and Arkestro at Tower 49 in New York City.
Experience
Founder & Principal Engineer, Vonar.ai (March 2025 to present, Washington DC metro area)
- Federal and legislative engagement: delivered live demonstrations of production generative AI voice systems to the GSA, congressional offices and U.S. Navy stakeholders, including a presentation at the U.S. Capitol on how AI can transform services for Congress; advocated for federal adoption of AI-driven maintenance and compliance software; secured letters of support from U.S. Senators and Members of Congress.
- Carahsoft partnership: Vonar.ai partnered with Carahsoft, the government IT solutions provider, so U.S. agencies can buy and deploy its AI voice automation through contract vehicles such as NASA SEWP V and ITES-SW2.
- Federal prime AI adoption (AATD, $300M+ in contract volume): designed, built and deployed a CMMC and compliance generative AI chatbot from requirements through production in a segregated federal environment, owning the full prototype-to-production arc.
- Revenue: passed $100K ARR within the first year through enterprise pilots and SOW engagements with defense and compliance customers.
- Perplexity Sonar Developer Competition: 1st place of 500+ teams and 5,000+ contestants (a $10K first prize); built an instantly provisioned voice agent chaining Perplexity Sonar search through Llama-4 into conversational answers.
- Voice AI platform and integrations: shipped enterprise-grade voice agents for IVR on Twilio with real-time speech-to-text, then retrieval-augmented generation, then ticketing and actions, with connectors for BMC, Jira and ServiceNow; reached 60% call-to-ticket automation and under 600 ms response latency in pilots.
- Network and cloud architecture: built on AWS with deployment into customer VPCs, segregated data silos and on-premise environments; containerized microservices, access controls and audit-friendly logging; horizontally scalable with autoscaling and Redis-backed state for concurrent multi-call loads.
Lead Engineer, Private Technology Consulting (January 2023 to October 2024, remote)
- Security and SOC 2 readiness (e-PlanSoft): migrated to salted password hashing and KMS-managed AES-256, enforced SSO/MFA and RBAC, and stood up audit logging and access reviews; cleared readiness with zero critical findings.
- Built a SeatGeek-integrated MVP for an Atlanta ticket brokerage in 4 weeks, automating inventory sync and cutting manual operations by more than 50%.
- Led 4 junior engineers and hardened a high-growth health-tech startup (UrgentIQ) with error monitoring and end-to-end tests, reducing user-visible errors.
Software Engineer, Arkestro (June 2022 to November 2024, promoted within 1 year, San Francisco, CA)
- Designed and shipped a supplier recommendation engine adopted by Fortune 500 clients including Walmart and Volkswagen.
- Built scalable AWS data-pipeline infrastructure delivering data availability in under 5 minutes, and automated procurement decisions from historical data.
- Two-time internal hackathon winner: milestone prediction in the procurement lifecycle, and recommendation expansion via novel data sources.
About Akshay Akula
Akshay Akula is an AI engineer and founder based in the Washington DC-Baltimore area. His main work is full-time as Hacker in Residence at NQB8, a technical venture studio. He also works on AI and agent strategy at Flex Capital and is the founder and principal engineer of Vonar.ai, an enterprise voice AI company serving government and defense customers. He previously worked as a software engineer at Arkestro and earned a B.S. in Computer Science from Virginia Tech in 2022.