About

I'm Balakrishnan V K, a software engineer in Singapore. I've spent 15+ years building products across AI, crypto, fintech, and martech, and I like staying hands-on: as an engineering manager I still ship code, own architecture, and debug production issues alongside running teams.

Since 2021 I've been at BitMEX, the crypto derivatives exchange, first as a senior engineer and as an engineering manager since 2022. I rebuilt its mobile presence after the original app was delisted: joined a stalled relaunch in January 2022, shipped the replacement React Native app that June, and grew the team from one engineer to seven while the app passed 100,000 users. Later I led the Web, API and Payments team, where the work included replacing a redirect-based fiat on-ramp with a unified in-platform flow across four providers, rebuilding the affiliate platform, and migrating the entire production frontend from Flow to TypeScript in two months by orchestrating AI coding agents, a migration that had defeated several previous attempts. BitMEX announced its closure in 2026; I stayed through the wind-down to help build the platform that lets customers withdraw their funds indefinitely after the exchange stops operating.

Before BitMEX I spent seven and a half years at Tookitaki, a Singapore RegTech company, where I architected the UI systems for anti-money-laundering and reconciliation platforms that run inside tier-1 banks across Asia, and served as product owner for the machine learning studio the company's data scientists used to build and run their pipelines. Before that: a co-founded startup where I built Twitter analytics systems handling 75 million users and tweets, and an enterprise SAP job at Infosys that bored me into teaching myself Node.js, which is how all of this started.

Away from work I make footwork, juke, and DnB as B10N.

Find me on LinkedIn or listen on SoundCloud.