Technology Leader and Consultant · London
Gopal Yendluri
Hands-on technology leader and former CTO with 22+ years building and scaling digital platforms across subscription e-commerce, logistics, data, and cloud. Still deeply technical, and helping teams adopt AI-assisted engineering well.
- Current role
- Principal Consultant, Krigo Ltd
- Experience
- 22+ years
- Based in
- London, UK
Who I Am
I'm a hands-on technology leader based in London with over two decades of experience building platforms that scale. My career started in C writing disaster recovery software for InMage (Microsoft) in Hyderabad, moved through telecom and SMS infrastructure, travel tech, mobile platforms, and eventually to leading engineering at subscription e-commerce businesses.
I’ve stayed close to the technical side throughout my career. I still review PRs, get involved in the code when needed, and use AI tools like Cursor and Claude in my day-to-day work. It helps me stay connected to the real challenges engineers face and make more practical, informed decisions.
From 2020 to 2026 I was CTO at Freddie's Flowers, a subscription flower delivery business, where I led platform modernisation, cross-country team scaling, and AI adoption across the engineering organisation. I now work as Principal Consultant at Krigo Ltd, helping companies with architecture, AI engineering adoption and technology leadership.
Career Timeline
Principal Consultant
Technology consulting: architecture reviews, AI engineering adoption, fractional technology leadership and technical due diligence.
Chief Technology Officer
Led technology strategy, platform modernisation, and AI adoption. Managed cross-functional teams across the UK and offshore.
Head of Technology
Led engineering for the world's most popular postcard app. Scaled infrastructure, migrated to Kubernetes, built data platform.
Lead Backend Developer, then Systems Architect / Head of Infrastructure
Re-architected backend systems, established AWS infrastructure, handled 100x traffic spikes with zero performance impact.
Technical Lead Consultant
Built travel meta-search engines with GDS integrations (Amadeus, Sabre). Payment systems, booking platforms, API architecture.
Lead Developer
Rebuilt API layer supporting iOS, Android, HP webOS, and Symbian. Scaled for Samsung Olympics campaign (100K transactions/hour).
Technical Architect
Built high-throughput SMS infrastructure using Kannel. Delivered 40 million SMS messages for political campaigns.
Senior Software Engineer
IPTV Centre of Excellence. Microsoft MediaRoom integration, real-time video delivery systems for telecom operators.
Software Engineer
Telecom offshore projects including reverse auction systems and M-interacTV mobile interactive television platform.
Software Engineer
Enterprise disaster recovery software in C. Volume-based and file-based replication, database replication using rsync.
PHP Developer
Developed centralised citizen information system working with District Informatics Officer. First professional role.
Technical Stack
Pennies Unsung Hero Award 2024
Awarded at the 5th Annual Pennies Awards (October 2024) for outstanding technical contribution to Freddie's Flowers' micro-donation integration, enabling customers to round up their payments to support UK charities. Freddie's Flowers also won the Partnership Breakthrough Award at the same ceremony.
- Category
- Unsung Hero
- Awarded by
- Pennies Foundation
- Year
- 2024
Not Forgotten Where I Came From
Clean Water for My Village
Personally funded and led the implementation of a reverse osmosis water purification plant in my native village in Andhra Pradesh, India. For years, the community relied on contaminated water sources with serious health consequences.
Designed for long-term sustainability: a nominal charge of 5p for 20 litres covers electricity and maintenance costs, ensuring the plant remains operational for the community.
Supporting Rural Education
Providing basic educational essentials (books, school bags, and shoes) to students in my native village and a few neighbouring rural communities. Small contributions that help children attend school with dignity.
In the UK, I work with local communities to advise young people on education pathways, career options, and job opportunities, helping bridge the gap between potential and opportunity.
No matter how far the journey takes me, my roots remain close to my heart.
What People Say
From colleagues, managers, and executives I've worked with over the years.
“Gopal arrived at a growing start-up that possessed a small-scale and creaking infrastructure and slow, unreliable APIs. He proceeded to re-engineer both. He massively improved the speed and reliability of our service and established an infrastructure that dealt with a spike of 100x in daily usage with no performance impact whatsoever. Incredible.”
“Gopal makes things work. Every company needs him.”
“I've seen this young man maturing over the years and I consider him a giant today. His eye for detail, meticulousness in delivering results, ability to vision out technical minutiae are truly great. He can quickly 'see' what others would take a few eons to understand.”
“If Gopal takes on anything you can be sure that it will be completed very successfully.”
“Super smart, always delivers, extremely responsible and reliable, master of all things AWS-PHP-Java-DB-SysAdmin (and then some), relaxed and always happy at 8am (or at 2am when GoDaddy goes down). As a Sr Developer or contractor, Gopal will no doubt be star performer in any team he joins.”
“Gopal is the Golden Child - his famous nickname at TouchNote as he was quite simply a treasure to work with. Gopal is an excellent developer, an intelligent man and someone I hope to work with again in the future. Truly brilliant at his job and a thoroughly nice person too.”
“Gopal is an excellent developer. He is extremely diligent, conscientious, humble and constantly good-natured, but is also an expert problem solver. He is someone you wish you could clone!”
“One of the most amazing people I have ever worked with. His passion and dedication to his work is second to none. Not only was he able to work diligently to solve complex problems but also break down step by step all the pieces that made a problem. Simply put, Gopal is a prodigy and is second to none.”
Recent Posts
Over Six Years at Freddie's Flowers: What I Built, What I Learned and Why I Stayed
After over six years as CTO at Freddie's Flowers, I've moved on. This is an honest look back: the team, the platform, the cost-centre problem, the board seat, and why I stayed two years longer than I first planned.
GEO in Practice: Optimising a Next.js Site for AI Answer Engines
Generative engine optimisation sounds like a new discipline, but most of what gets you cited by ChatGPT, Perplexity or AI Overviews is classic indexing done properly. Here is what I actually changed on this site, what I skipped, and how I check whether any of it works.
Agentic Commerce: Making a Subscription Store Usable by AI Shopping Agents
AI assistants are starting to browse, compare and buy on behalf of people. For a subscription business that raises awkward questions about data, APIs, consent, payments and cancellations. Here is how I would prepare without betting the roadmap on standards that are still settling.
Let's Talk
I take on a small number of consulting and advisory engagements: architecture and platform reviews, AI-assisted engineering, fractional CTO support and technical due diligence. I'm also always happy to talk engineering.