Janani runs her own consulting practice. She currently works with several coalitions directly, and is regularly brought in as a sub-contractor on larger technology audits and digital assessments.

She started at Deloitte, building data warehousing systems in Mumbai, before leaving to join MKSS, a social movement in Rajasthan known for its work on the right to information and public accountability. Two years there shaped her politics: transparency is not an administrative matter, it is a political one, and the people most affected by a decision have the most at stake in how it is recorded. She trained rural youth in participatory monitoring, ran public hearings on wage entitlements, and was invited world over to shape youth activists in the same methods. Gandhi and Ambedkar remain her two important reference points, while Aruna Roy has been a mentor and a friend.

From 2014 to 2016, she was one of two national coordinators of the Pension Parishad, a coalition of over 200 groups spanning trade unions, informal-sector networks, and NGOs across 22 states, campaigning for universal pension rights. The work produced policy research submitted to the Prime Minister's Office; the harder work was holding the coalition together through competing priorities, resource inequity, and the personalities of leaders who had spent decades building their own bases. Music and a willingness to name what was in the room were her strongest tools. Thereafter, she worked inside government — on social audit and accountability programmes at state and national scale.

Janani is a Carnatic musician who also sings folk, and has led singing workshops from MKSS village gatherings to London. Music functions in her work as a method of convening: it puts people in the same tempo and the same breath, and briefly suspends the hierarchy of who has the right to speak. Her collaborations include Floyd-Fenix, a bilingual solidarity cover linking movements across countries, and work with Yalgaar Sanskrutik Manch. She sings with two acapella choirs in Basel while teaching Carnatic music.

From 2019 to 2025, she was Senior Digital Specialist at VSO, a global volunteering INGO operating across 20+ countries. She led digital transformation, advised the CEO, ran the organisation's first AI readiness and ethics assessment, and delivered learning infrastructure for distributed teams. It was yet another aspect to what she'd learned in movements: from how to challenge institutions, to how to change them from inside, working within a given set of constraints.

Janani trained as an IT engineer before becoming an activist, and works today at the place those two identities meet. Technology is not neutral: who builds it, whose data it collects, and whose problems it is designed to solve are political questions before they are technical ones. Her research includes the Devolution Index (TISS), the Pension Parishad report to the PMO, and social audit reports on the TN PVP scheme.