About
Applied AI Engineer & Backend Lead — 4+ years building production AI systems for a consumer app serving millions. I work end-to-end across applied AI and the distributed systems behind it. I designed and shipped a monetized multimodal natural-language profile search over 4M+ profiles and images (vector embeddings + hybrid semantic search and re-ranking) that drives 20% of daily revenue, plus AI-powered matching that pairs users by compatibility. I owned the speech layer of a real-time voice assistant — self-hosting TTS/STT behind an mTLS gateway at sub-200ms p99, ~80% cheaper than managed APIs — and rearchitected the recommendation engine into a two-stage retrieve-and-rank system serving 170M+ swipes/month, optimising peak-hour latency from 30s to 1s. Beyond AI, I've built core product and platform: a payments/monetisation service driving ₹4Cr+ ARR, media infrastructure on CloudFront + Go, Kafka + Flink pipelines ingesting 1M+ events/hour into StarRocks, and Kubernetes infra across AWS, GCP, and Azure — leading near-zero-downtime cloud migrations (cutting infra cost via cloud credits) and production K8s cluster upgrades. As backend tech lead, I lead and mentor the backend team, own architecture and code reviews, and partner with product and the app team to ship features end-to-end. Looking to bring this blend of hands-on applied AI and large-scale systems engineering to a team building AI products for hundreds of millions of users. CS @ BITS Pilani. Happy to talk LLMs, inference, and recommendation systems.
Work experience
Lead Software Engineer at Schmooze, Jan 2026 - Present · 8 mos, On-site
Software Development Engineer II at Schmooze, Nov 2024 - Dec 2025 · 1 yr 2 mos, On-site
Software Development Engineer I at Schmooze, Oct 2022 - Oct 2024 · 2 yrs 1 mo, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
Software Development Engineer 1 at Ola, Jul 2022 - Oct 2022 · 4 mos, Bengaluru, Karnataka, India
SDE Intern at Licious - Born to meat, Jul 2021 - Dec 2021 · 6 mos, Bangalore Urban, Karnataka, India
Oasis Joint Coordinator at Department of Visual Media, BITS Pilani, May 2020 - Oct 2020 · 6 mos
Summer Intern at Department of Agriculture, Govt. of Goa, May 2020 - Jun 2020 · 2 mos
Android App Developer at Department of Visual Media, BITS Pilani, Aug 2018 - May 2020 · 1 yr 10 mos, Jhunjhunu, Rajasthan, India
