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Venkatesan Ramachandran

Designing an AI-Native Decision Platform from First Principles

Designing an AI-Native Decision Platform from First Principles

I recently finished a full architecture cycle for an AI-native retail decision platform. Strategy, product requirements, architecture design document. Ontology-first. Semantic layers. Agentic workflows with governed autonomy. The full stack, designed from first principles for retail use cases. I want to explain why we made the choices we made, because

Retail Data as an AI Platform

Retail Data as an AI Platform

The next decade of value in retail data unlocks through governed agentic decisioning inside the UK GDPR and EU AI Act perimeter. Not through another dashboard. Not through a chatbot bolted onto a catalogue. Not through a model running in someone else's cloud. Retailers have spent fifteen years

Multi-Tenant SaaS with PostgreSQL Row-Level Security: Beyond the Basics

Multi-Tenant SaaS with PostgreSQL Row-Level Security: Beyond the Basics

Multi-tenant SaaS with PostgreSQL row-level security: beyond the basics When I started building our SaaS platform, I had a simple question: how do I stop Tenant A from seeing Tenant B's data? The platform handles API management for multiple organisations. Each one has its own routes, consumers, analytics,

Building an Open Source Gateway to Sell an Enterprise Platform

Building an Open Source Gateway to Sell an Enterprise Platform

Building an open source gateway to sell an enterprise platform I built an open source API gateway. Apache 2.0 licence. Anyone can use it, fork it, sell it. The goal was not charity. The goal was to sell an enterprise platform. This is the story of why I did

Three Questions Every Retail CTO Should Answer by Q3 2026

Three Questions Every Retail CTO Should Answer by Q3 2026

I spend most of my working hours inside a retail-data platform that serves one of the world's largest grocers and 25-odd tier-1 retailer partnerships globally. Before this I ran the engineering org behind Fulfilled-by-Maersk: 200-plus engineers, $200M portfolio, 130 countries. In both jobs the same thing keeps happening.

Context Engineering Replaced Prompt Engineering — Here's Why It Matters

Context Engineering Replaced Prompt Engineering — Here's Why It Matters

The Thoughtworks Technology Radar, Volume 33 (November 2025), promoted "context engineering" from a niche concern to an adopted technique. Easy to miss among the usual Radar noise. Worth paying attention to. The distinction is simple. Prompt engineering is what you do inside a model's context window

Why Your Company Needs One API Platform, Not Six

Why Your Company Needs One API Platform, Not Six

Why your company needs one API platform, not six I counted the tools we were using to manage our APIs last year. Six. Six separate SaaS products, each with its own login, its own config format, its own billing page, its own way of thinking about the world. One for