{ practising clarity }

AKHILKRISHNAN

I translate complexity into decisions people can live with.

01

ABOUT ME

By day, I help businesses move things across borders, reliably and repeatedly. I've worked across operations, IT infrastructure, commercial, and sales-operations roles, which means I care as much about how systems behave under stress as I do about how they look on a slide. I'm drawn to work that compounds: subscriptions over one-offs, trust over tactics, long relationships over short wins.

Outside of work, I run farther than is strictly necessary, read history and philosophy as operating manuals, and tinker with code to stay honest about how technology actually works. I picked up Rust not to become a purist, but to remember what it feels like to think carefully again.

I'm interested in logistics, climate, and open-source technology, but my attention consistently returns to incentives: how they shape behaviour, distribute responsibility, and quietly determine outcomes. I believe discipline is a form of self-respect, that good systems reduce suffering, and that most problems become more tractable once they're named precisely.

This site is a notebook, not a monument. A place for ideas in progress.

02

WORK HISTORY

I joined DHL from the ground up and moved deliberately through operations, infrastructure, commercial, and now sales-operations roles. Each step added a new layer of perspective on how large systems actually work when theory meets pressure.

SALES OPERATIONS

May 2026 – Present Automation Lead

I now lead the end-to-end automation of DHL Canada's spot-quote desk, replacing a manual quoting process with an autonomous workflow. The role is half sales operations, half systems design — closer to how the business actually runs than to any single function.

The work begins with stakeholder discovery: mapping the full quote lifecycle to define automation scope, controls, and success criteria. From there I designed a seven-stage solution architecture in Microsoft Power Automate — spanning email intake, LLM-driven extraction of quote parameters from unstructured customer email, validation, quote generation, e-signature integration, and SharePoint / Dataverse logging.

What I'm learning

  • Automation reveals which parts of a process were real
  • Discovery beats design when the scope is soft
  • Systems inherit the seams of the org that builds them

COMMERCIAL

2023 – 2026 Account Rep

I worked in commercial sales, managing a portfolio of recurring-revenue customers shipping internationally on an ongoing basis. The focus was on long-term relationships, solution design, and sustainable growth rather than transactional wins.

My background in operations and infrastructure informed how I sold: with an eye toward feasibility, system impact, and trust over time. 120 accounts, $1.6M in recurring revenue — highest new customer acquisition and revenue growth on the team in both 2024 and 2025.

What I learnt

  • Sales is system stewardship, not persuasion
  • Long-term incentives shape better behaviour
  • Clarity compounds faster than pressure

IT INFRASTRUCTURE

2021 – 2023 Technical Lead

From operations, I moved into IT infrastructure, becoming the primary point of responsibility for systems supporting DHL facilities across Western Canada. 10 facilities, ~400 end users. The work focused on uptime, networks, end-user support, and incident response in environments where failure immediately affected customers and staff.

I worked closely with Operations teams, translating technical constraints into practical solutions and learning how organisational systems behave under stress.

What I learnt

  • Downtime is a human problem before it's a technical one
  • Clear ownership beats perfect architecture
  • Systems fail at their seams, not their centres

OPERATIONS

2020 – 2021 Courier

I started in operations, moving shipments and working directly inside time-critical logistics during COVID peak. This was the business in its most physical form: routes, deadlines, handoffs, and no room for abstraction. Every delay had a face. Every success was quiet and procedural. Route plans I developed were later adopted by the training team as reference material for new hires.

What I learnt

  • Reliability is built, not promised
  • Good systems respect frontline reality
  • Operational work deserves design, not heroics

This role permanently shaped how I think about service, accountability, and respect for execution.

03

PROJECTS

I work on things that sharpen how I think. Some ship. Most teach.

Ongoing

AI WORKFLOWS

I build automation at two scales. At work, that means workflow architecture in Microsoft Power Automate. Outside it, smaller tools that strip friction out of things I do every day — Node, SQL, Rust, whatever the problem calls for. Both teach the same lesson: most processes are messier than they look, and the real work is deciding what to leave out.

Ongoing

LOGISTICS AS A SYSTEM

A side project exploring what happens when you apply technology seriously to freight. Logistics is a systems problem, and most of the interesting work is still undone.

logisteer.ca →
04

WRITING

I write to clarify what I think. Publication is secondary.

Most pieces sit somewhere between notes, essays, and field observations. They tend to return to the same themes: systems under pressure, discipline as self-respect, endurance, logistics, technology, and how incentives quietly shape behaviour.

Some entries are polished. Many are not. All are attempts at precision.

Early Work • 2015–2019

These excerpts were written during my physics degree, with coursework spanning philosophy, economics, and English. The vocabulary was academic. The concerns were consistent: autonomy, legitimacy, institutional design, and the limits of certainty.

Individual and Society

McCandless, like many of us, saw that the society he lived in was sick. It was sick with materialism and the unending desire to accumulate wealth. He sought to distance himself from that which he perceived to be corrupt. The journey he embarked upon was not one of escapism but one of self-authorship.

Early fascination with autonomy, materialism, and self-direction.

Evidence and Projection

Until we find another 'isolated' system where life has begun from merely the chemical constituents that it is composed of and the materials indispensable to it, it is extremely difficult and dangerous to draw conclusions on the existence of extraterrestrial life based solely on probabilities and numbers. Whether we induce life in a laboratory or discover it on another extraterrestrial object, this is essential to our acceptance of the existence of extraterrestrial life. If we do not, we will be drawing conclusions based on projections, rather than observation. As Carl Sagan said "it would be astonishing to me if there weren't extraterrestrial intelligence, but of course there is as yet no compelling evidence for it."

A turn toward epistemic restraint and methodological caution.

Liberty and Indirect Harm

His argument that society has no standing to curtail the rights of the individual does not consider the different dangers arising from different unrestricted actions. Consider a crowded marketplace: is it appropriate to yell that there is a snake or there is a fire if there is none? If the intent is merely to joke, then the actor did not intend to harm anyone, though his actions can be reasonably shown to have incited a panic and possibly a stampede. Even if the intent is innocent, the outcome can be catastrophic. We must not only consider if an individual's actions are likely to directly harm others, but whether they are as likely to cause indirect harm.

An early interest in edge cases, thresholds, and unintended consequences.

Punishment and Legitimacy

A dangerous cycle of offend and reoffend is perpetuated by the imposition of collateral consequences that extend beyond the sentence handed down by the court. This harms the offender, their family, and society at large.

Their very existence and imposition outside of the formal process of reprimand damages their legitimacy. Punishment must be proportionate to the crime committed and must be imposed through a transparent and recognised process.

Concern with proportionality, hidden punishment, and structural feedback loops.

Institutions and Equality

The imposition of law does not guarantee equality if the institutions applying that law are shaped by unequal structures.

An early articulation of institutional scepticism.

Ongoing

More is coming.

05

READING

A small record of what's been holding my attention.

DEATH'S END Cixin Liu
  • SECOND FOUNDATION Isaac Asimov
  • THE DARK FOREST Cixin Liu
  • WHERE TO FROM HERE Bill Morneau