Engineering Leader
Krunal Prajapati
Technical Project Director & Head of Engineering, Lucent Innovation
Krunal Prajapati is an engineering leader with over a decade of experience building scalable, production-ready systems. At Lucent Innovation, he leads product engineering, service delivery, and AI engineering across Shopify Plus, AWS, Databricks, distributed systems, and Generative AI. His experience spans e-commerce, fintech, telecom, SaaS, and enterprise data platforms. Still hands-on with architecture and code, his writing focuses on practical engineering decisions, trade-offs, and real-world lessons.
Areas of Expertise
Cloud-Native & AWS Architecture
Designing systems that scale to millions of users without losing availability, security, or operational sanity. Serverless, event-driven, and multi-cloud patterns across AWS, Azure, and GCP — including the trade-offs nobody puts in the reference architecture diagram.
Databricks & Data Engineering
Lakehouse architecture, pipeline design, and data platform modernisation. Practical guidance from delivering Databricks work as a certified partner — where the Medallion architecture earns its keep, and where it's overkill.
Generative AI & Agentic Systems
Building RAG applications, AI assistants, AI agents, and intelligent automation that survive contact with production. Evaluation, cost control, latency, and failure modes — the parts that decide whether an AI pilot ever ships.
Distributed Systems & Microservices
Service boundaries, consistency models, observability, and the migration paths between them. Written for teams deciding whether to split a monolith — and for those who split one and regret it.
Engineering Leadership & Team Building
Scaling engineering organisations: hiring, technical practices, architecture review, mentoring, and delivery models that hold under pressure. Leadership writing from someone who still reads the pull requests.
Shopify Plus & Commerce Engineering
Enterprise Shopify architecture as a Shopify Plus Partner: headless and Hydrogen storefronts, custom app development, checkout extensibility, ERP and CRM integrations, and replatforming onto Plus without losing traffic. Written for teams weighing Shopify Plus against custom commerce — including when Shopify is the wrong answer.