Ankush Rai — Portfolio

Experience

ZS — Senior Software Engineer

Jul 2024 – Jan 2025 · Bengaluru, IN
- Led migration from a legacy Tableau dashboard to a modern web application using React, FastAPI, and Spring Boot with Redis, reducing latency by 45% and eliminating $100K/year in licensing costs.
- Built ML microservice for anomaly detection in clinical system logs and operational metrics using isolation forests and time-series features, reducing triage time by 30%.
- Developed a real-time notification system with WebSockets and AWS MSK, enabling sub-580ms delivery for alerts used by research and operations teams with 99.9% uptime.
- Implemented automated CI/CD pipelines with GitLab and Docker, replacing ad-hoc scripts and sequential builds — cutting deployment time by 35% and ensuring smoother, more reliable releases.
ZS — Software Engineer

Mar 2022 – Jun 2024 · Bengaluru, IN
- Developed a GenAI-powered pipeline to extract KPIs from 10K+ unstructured healthcare reports using prompt chaining and preprocessing - automated 20+ analyst hours/week.
- Optimised RESTful APIs to handle 3 times higher concurrent load by tuning DB connection pooling, adding Redis caching, and validating stability through JMeter load tests.
- Integrated Prometheus and Grafana to monitor service health and improve incident response time.
- Protected HIPAA-compliant pharmaceutical APIs by integrating Okta SSO with JWT tokens and rate-limiting, securing access to 500K+ patient records for research teams.
EY — Software Engineer I

Oct 2020 – Feb 2022 · Bengaluru, IN
- Improved backend performance by 35% for a large automotive platform by implementing caching, pagination, and streamlined payload handling across services built with NodeJS and Spring Boot.
- Fixed race conditions in multithreaded services using locks and task queues — enhanced system stability and reduced transactional errors by 15%.
- Tuned PostgreSQL performance using indexing and execution plan analysis, cutting query latency in key workflows.
- Built robust unit and integration test suites with Pytest and Postman, increasing coverage and reducing production issues.
Pantech Solutions — Machine Learning Intern

Aug 2018 – Nov 2018 · Chennai, IN
- Developed data validation and preprocessing scripts for real-time stock data pipelines, improving training input quality.
- Trained and validated ML models (Linear Regression, SVM) using scikit-learn to predict short-term stock trends, applying feature engineering for improved accuracy.
- Documented edge cases and model drift patterns to improve debugging and retraining workflows.

Education

Santa Clara University

Santa Clara, CA · March 2025 – March 2027

Master of Science in Computer Science and Engineering
SRM Institute of Science and Technology

India · August 2016 – June 2020

Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science and Engineering

Projects

Personal & Open Source

CFO Copilot: Mini FP&A Agent

Lightweight FP&A assistant built with Streamlit that reads CSV fixtures and answers common finance questions with text summaries, charts, and 2-page PDF exports. Features rule-based intent classifier with TF-IDF/embedding fallback for Revenue vs Budget, Gross Margin %, Opex, EBITDA, and Cash runway metrics.

Python
Streamlit
RAG
sentence-transformers
TF‑IDF
Pandas
PDF Export

cf_ai_chat_memory: Persistent AI Chat on Cloudflare

A serverless AI chat assistant built entirely on Cloudflare that remembers conversations. Uses Llama 3.1 8B via Workers AI for intelligent responses, Cloudflare Workers for edge compute, and Cloudflare KV for persistent conversation memory with 24-hour sessions.

JavaScript
Cloudflare Workers
Workers AI
Llama 3.1 8B
Cloudflare KV
Serverless
Edge Computing
Wrangler

Virtual Memory Management Simulator

Simulates OS virtual memory paging using five page replacement algorithms (FIFO, LRU, LFU, MFU, Random). Models locality of reference with 150 random processes, tracking hit ratios and page swaps.

C
Operating Systems
Algorithms
Memory Management
Data Structures

PaperTrail: NVIDIA AI Document Intelligence for Nonprofits

Real-time document understanding platform for nonprofits. Parses PDFs with pypdf/pypdfium2 + NVIDIA OCR NIM, embeds chunks with NVIDIA embed-qa-4, retrieves via in-memory vector store, and generates structured JSON with NVIDIA Nemotron showing critical/important insights, deadlines, and AI-generated action steps.

Python
FastAPI
NVIDIA NIM
RAG
LangChain
Vector DB
OCR
Nemotron

Acoustic Shield: AI Vehicle Emergency Sound Detection

AI-powered audio classification system deployed on AWS that detects vehicle emergency sounds in real-time. Uses wav2vec2 model to classify tire skids, emergency braking, and collision-imminent scenarios with sub-500ms latency.

Python
AWS SageMaker
PyTorch
HuggingFace
wav2vec2
Audio ML
S3
librosa

GreenSense: Automated Plant Health Monitoring

JavaFX plant monitoring system with event-driven architecture and custom EventBus. Implements environmental simulation engine with automated hydration/thermal regulation, pest detection, and species-parameterized health model using SOLID design patterns (Singleton, Observer, Factory).

Java
JavaFX
Maven
OOP
Design Patterns
Event-Driven

Enterprise & Industry Projects

Digital Control Tower

Amgen · ZS Associates

Led development of a centralized monitoring platform that tracks API performance and system health metrics in real-time; ML-driven anomaly detection reduces incident response time and prevents ~15% of potential downtime events.

Java
Spring Boot
Python
Flask
scikit‑learn
JavaScript
ML

Quality Control Schedule Optimization

Pfizer · ZS Associates

Real-time notification system delivering live alerts via Kafka and WebSockets on AWS MSK; achieved sub-580ms latency with 99.9% uptime for critical quality control operations.

FastAPI
Kafka (MSK)
AWS
GenAI

Adaptive Onboarding Experience Engine

General Motors · EY

Collaborative filtering recommendation system that personalizes content on user onboarding dashboards, significantly boosting feature adoption and user engagement across GM's digital platforms.

Python
scikit‑learn
Pandas
Flask

Skills

Languages & Frameworks

Languages: Python, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, C

Backend: FastAPI, Spring Boot, Flask, Express.js

Frontend: React, Streamlit

AI & Machine Learning

Frameworks: TensorFlow, PyTorch, scikit-learn

GenAI/LLM: RAG, LangChain, Hugging Face, OpenAI API, NVIDIA NIM

NLP: Transformers, Embeddings, TF-IDF, sentence-transformers

Data & Infrastructure

Databases: PostgreSQL, MySQL, Redis, Vector DBs

Streaming: Kafka, AWS MSK, WebSockets

Data Tools: Pandas, NumPy, Matplotlib, Jupyter

Cloud & DevOps

Cloud: AWS (EC2, S3, MSK, Lambda), Azure

DevOps: Docker, GitLab CI/CD, GitHub Actions

Monitoring: Prometheus, Grafana, CloudWatch

Publications

Image Compression with Neural Network using Autoencoder – Designed and implemented deep autoencoders for image compression, including a focused study on the MNIST dataset. Achieved significant reduction in storage requirements while maintaining reconstruction quality.
Weather Forecasting System using Machine Learning – Built ML-based models for short-term weather prediction using regression and time-series analysis, improving accuracy over baseline methods.

Awards

Spot Award (ZS Associates): Recognized for initiative and problem-solving in deploying a GenAI-based insight module for Pfizer’s Quality Control and Digital Optimization project.
Team Impact Award (ZS Associates): For contributing to high-impact deliverables in Amgen’s cross-functional setup.
Bravo (EY): Acknowledged for demonstrating consistent high-quality work for GM product modernization.

Contact

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Senior Software Engineer Scalable Backends · Distributed Systems · ML Integration · AWS

Experience

ZS — Senior Software Engineer

ZS — Software Engineer

EY — Software Engineer I

Pantech Solutions — Machine Learning Intern