EXPERTISE
Hiring; Product Marketing; Software Development; Customer Success; Product Development; Leadership Coaching
BUSINESS MODEL EXPERIENCE
B2B; B2B2C; B2C
EXPERTISE IN THESE COUNTRIES
India; United States; United Kingdom
Aakash TM
Christchurch
Aakash T M is a Lead Software Engineer and Technical Architect with 7 years of experience building the kind of systems that hold up when things get real. Based in Christchurch, NZ, he specialises in high-throughput event-driven architectures, multi-agent LLM pipelines, and deep backend engineering across Go, TypeScript, and Node.js on AWS.
He's architected systems processing 16,000 messages per second, cut infrastructure costs by 56%, and compressed a 6-week delivery into 10 days using AI-assisted development. Most recently at Expedite Commerce, he built an LLM-native sales intelligence platform processing 100K events per day across 8 enterprise clients.
What sets him apart in a startup context is that he doesn't stop at the technical. At both NeoITO and ISPG, he led pre-sales calls, scoped engagements, closed client projects and SaaS contracts, and drove partnerships including taking a product to AWS Marketplace. Sales brought the lead;Aakash closed it. He's made direct business decisions, not just technical ones.
He stays 50 to 60 percent hands-on in senior roles, has mentored 8 engineers who all went on to lead their own teams. He also built VecLite, an open-source client-side vector search library in Rust and WASM.
He's at his best where architecture decisions have real consequences, speed matters, and the line between engineering and business is blurred.
Why are you passionate about working with startup founders?
Over the past seven years, Aakash has rarely stayed in his lane. He's architected distributed systems from scratch, led engineering teams, closed client deals, driven cloud partnerships, responded to live security incidents, and made business decisions well beyond what most engineers are ever asked to touch. The title changed a few times. The scope never really did.
What draws him to founders is the variety of problems they take on and how real those problems are. Most engineers sit a few layers away from the actual pain their software is trying to solve. Aakash has never been comfortable with that distance. He's been on the calls, in the rooms, close to the customers and the consequences. Working with founders means the problems are as real as they get.
He's also honest about his own motivations. Founding something is on his own horizon and he thinks the best way to prepare for that is to be close to people who are already in it. Mentoring founders at Ministry of Awesome isn't purely altruistic. It's about learning the parts of the journey he hasn't lived yet, while helping founders skip past some of the pain he has.
He's spent his career finding a way through hard problems. Helping founders do the same feels like the right next thing.
What experience do you have working with startup founders?
Most of the client work Aakash has done throughout his career has been with founder-led companies in their early stages. He's been embedded in those teams, not just delivering code but working closely with founders on product direction, architectural decisions, and the kind of ambiguous problems that don't have a clean answer yet.
A founder he worked with early in his career described him as someone who collaborated at a high level and felt like a genuine ally to the team. A CPTO and Co-Founder he worked with more recently, who came from a director-level background at a major tech company, noted that Aakash took the shifting priorities and uncertainty of startup life in stride, and that his sense of ownership over the product felt equal to his own.
That kind of working relationship is what he enjoys most. Being close enough to the problem to actually care about the outcome.