Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Hari Krishnan has over two decades of experience building high-performing teams, designing scalable systems, and driving technical strategy for large enterprises and high-growth startups across finance, telecom, logistics, and retail. As Founder and CEO of Polarizer Technologies (https://polarizer.in), he has led enterprise-wide initiatives for clients across architecture, developer experience, test automation, and AI adoption, and also helps teams build AI-native products. His current focus is context engineering for AI-assisted delivery. He engineers “harnesses” that enable reliable human–agent collaboration. He is the creator of Intent-Driven Dev (https://intent-driven.dev), where he shares Spec-Driven Development and other techniques that improve alignment between intent and implementation when using AI coding agents, and help organizations scale AI-augmented SDLC practices. He combines deep technical expertise with executive-level collaboration, having worked closely with CXOs on strategy, delivery assurance, and organizational agility. He is widely recognized for contributions to platform engineering and spec-driven development, and actively contributes to open-source projects. Hari speaks regularly at international conferences and industry forums on AI-assisted software delivery, context engineering, and building AI-native products. Interests: distributed systems, AI-native products, and AI-augmented and agentic software delivery.
Bringing the best teams together for the job, Polarizer Technologies specialises in providing technical advisory along with hands on guidance and rollout of transformation programs. Hari and his team have helped several clients with their strategic initiatives including AI Augmented and Agentic Software Delivery (AWS Bedrock, Step Functios and Agent Core, N8N), Digital Transformation, Cloud Native and ServerLess, Platform Engineering, Quality (Clean Code and Extreme Programming) and Performance / Scaling. Clients include Kumu, GoTo Group and several boutique consulting and product companies.
As AsyncAPI spec Ambassador, Hari helps spread the word by presenting at conferences and through his blog posts and articles. He also feeds back industry input into the specification community. https://www.asyncapi.com/community/ambassadors/harikrishnan83
Built and scaled a contract-driven development platform (contract testing, API mocking) from open source to a commercial product suite. Handled multiple areas including product, engineering, go-to-market, and customer success. 1. Co-created the Specmatic open-source project and drove its evolution into a paid product suite with tiered pricing and enterprise features. 2. Drove pre-sales and closed competitive deals against incumbent vendors, won several strategic accounts. 3. Established API Governance practices at multiple enterprises as a domain thought leader in contract-driven development. 4. Evangelised the product through international conference talks, technical articles, and videos and owned DevRel. 5. Built and nurtured the open-source community, including contribution guidelines, roadmaps, and issue triage. 6. Hired and onboarded engineers and PMs, instituted engineering standards, release cadence, and quality gates. 7. Owned Customer Success achieved high renewal rates by ensuring stability, timely support, and outcome-driven adoption. 8. Shaped the product’s AI narrative, building a conversational interface for API creation and exposing contract testing and mocking capabilities through MCP for coding agents. 9. Worked with legal counsel to file multiple patents, strengthening the product's IP.
In his capacity as Principal Technology Advisory, Hari helped assess, identify and address concerns regarding engineering and delivery practices, helped with recruitment (including interviewing candidates for the CTO role) and grooming their senior engineers. He established practice of weekly roll up of Technology Initiatives to Business Heads and Leadership team to drive changes on a fast-track. Hari was also involved vendor assessment prior to procurement. In addition, he served as interim Tech Lead for several teams, both to bridge hiring gaps and gain firsthand understanding of on-the-ground challenges.
Hari led the transformation effort involving customer, drive and finance automation and back office portals. He re-architected legacy systems to adhere to tech strategy set by the CTO. He worked directly with the COO and VPs in translating their product road map into requirements for the team. Hari also trained several team members by pair programming with them. He worked closely with Product Teams and facilitated Discovery Workshops to get Business and Tech to collaborate effectively.