Gopal
Yendluri
Hands-on CTO with 22+ years building and scaling digital platforms across subscription e-commerce, logistics, data, and cloud. Still deeply technical — and actively driving AI-assisted engineering adoption.
Who I Am
I'm a hands-on CTO based in London with over two decades of experience building platforms that scale. My career started in C writing disaster recovery software for 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.
Currently CTO at Freddie's Flowers, a subscription flower delivery business. Led platform modernisation, cross-country team scaling, and AI adoption across the engineering organisation.
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.
Not Forgotten Where I Came From
Clean Water for My Village
Led the planning and 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.
The project is designed for long-term sustainability — a nominal charge of 5p for 20 litres covers electricity and maintenance costs, ensuring the plant remains operational without ongoing external funding.
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.
Recent Posts
AI Editor Wars: Cursor vs Claude Code vs Kiro — An Honest CTO's Comparison
I've used Cursor daily for over a year, experimented extensively with Claude Code, and evaluated Kiro since its launch. Here's my honest take — not a marketing comparison, but a practitioner's view from a CTO who still writes code.
AI Adoption Strategy for Engineering Teams: How to Do It Without Losing Quality
Introducing AI tooling to an engineering team is easy. Getting the team to use it well — maintaining quality, developing good intuitions about AI output, not creating a dependency — is hard. Here's our approach.
22 Years in Tech: What I've Actually Learned About Building Engineering Teams
From writing C for Microsoft's disaster recovery software in 2006 to running AI-assisted agentic engineering workflows at Freddie's Flowers in 2025 — here's what 22 years has actually taught me about building engineering teams.
Let's Talk
Whether it's a CTO opportunity, technical advisory, or just a conversation about engineering — I'm always happy to connect.
contact@yendluri.com