---
title: "Akshat Gupta - Lead Software Engineer in Bengaluru | Tal"
description: "Meet Akshat Gupta, AI Engineer & Backend Lead | Generative AI | Distributed Systems | BITS Pilani CS 2022 based in Bengaluru. AI stack includes antigravity, claude code, and codex."
image: "https://tal.club/meet/akshat-5/share-image"
---

# Akshat Gupta on Tal

## Headline

AI Engineer & Backend Lead \| Generative AI \| Distributed Systems \| BITS Pilani CS 2022

## 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\.

## Location

Bengaluru

## AI stack

antigravity

claude code

codex

cursor

elevenlabs

gemini

## 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

## Education

Bachelor of Engineering \- BE, Computer Science, Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani

The Emerald Heights International School

[View the original profile](https://tal.club/meet/akshat-5)

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