# Ishaan Shah Software Engineer · MEng CS @ Cornell University Ishaan Shah — Cornell MEng (CS). Previously Software Engineer at VectorShift (YC S23); founding engineer at Niti.AI; GSoC at Postman. Backend and AI systems. Open to full-time roles starting May 2027. Looking for a workplace with high standards and high trust — full-time roles across backend, AI infrastructure, and applied AI, starting May 2027. - Email: ics35@cornell.edu - Location: Ithaca, NY - GitHub: https://github.com/ishaan812 - LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ishaan812/ - Twitter: https://twitter.com/ishaan812 - Résumé (PDF): https://ishaan812.com/resume.pdf ## About I grew up with computers as furniture. At six, an old laptop became a portal. Flash games led to Minecraft, and Minecraft to modding: watching a wooden stick become a lightning staff crystallized something that never left. I wanted to build for the long run: software that outlives me and shapes how people work. Game jams, college clubs, hackathons, and open source taught me to ship under pressure and speak up even as the junior in the room. An AsyncAPI discussion I almost skipped led to Google Summer of Code 2023 at Postman. In my sophomore year I joined Niti.AI as a founding engineer. I joined romanticizing startups; working inside one only pulled me closer, and showed how demanding it is to build something that lasts. Owning systems for some of the largest Indian enterprises taught me that reliability is the product, and that ownership means living with the consequences of your decisions. At VectorShift, scaling AI systems from early startups to massive Enterprise customers clarified how I like to work: own hard problems, thrive in ambiguity, and ship execution people can trust. I am now an MEng student in Computer Science at Cornell. I want to keep building as an engineer and owner of hard problems. Currently obsessed with building AI agents that automate the boring parts of life, and going deeper into LLM inference systems. ## Experience ### Software Engineer · VectorShift (YC S23) Jul 2025 – Jul 2026 · Remote, New York - Built a text-to-workflow AI agent in Rust that creates and edits validated multi-node workflows across 300+ integrations, cutting 80% of the time and know-how needed to assemble complex workflow graphs. - Led the Python SDK rewrite with 12 platform primitives, IDE autocompletion, validation, automated Mintlify docs, and CI for API drift; shipped REST and WebSocket APIs in Go and Rust to support the new SDK. Onboarded 50+ external developers in 3 months. - Built an agent eval suite covering 50+ scenarios for continuous testing and benchmarking, so teams could catch regressions early and score new models across parameters before release. - Unified frontend and backend authentication flows across 300+ integrations and added fine-grained scope control so users grant only the permissions each integration needs. - Integrated 50+ external services such as Google Workspace, Notion, and Box across the platform within 3 months. ### Founding Engineer · Niti.AI Aug 2022 – Jun 2025 · Hybrid, Bengaluru - Launched a no-code platform so enterprise teams could ship in-app onboarding, personalization, and growth campaigns without engineering releases; adopted by 30+ clients across banks, media, and retail. - Built multi-tenant Go backends on AWS, Docker, and PostgreSQL with tenant isolation, RBAC, and on-prem deployments, supporting 20+ tenants and 2 on-prem deployments. - Built a LangGraph agent harness with multi-provider RAG, usage limits, and failover for high availability, plus a qualitative eval suite that scored new models for tenant approval and saved up to 90% in token costs with no quality regressions by adopting frontier and open-source models as soon as they shipped. - Shipped AI-driven RAG and recommendation systems that lifted CTR by up to 1% (60K+ monthly clicks). - Built Snowplow event-tracking pipelines and worked with enterprise clients including HDFC Bank, Axis Bank, and Apna Mart. ### Open Source Contributor · Google Summer of Code @ Postman May 2023 – Sep 2023 · Remote - Scaled a distributed GitHub crawler to scan 80,000+ files and surface 4,000+ validated OpenAPI/Swagger specs through a search API with typical queries under 250ms. ### Back End Intern · 24 Frames Digital Jul 2022 – Aug 2022 · Mumbai, India - Shipped a real-time chat module for VCM 3.0 (Socket.IO, Node.js, React) and load-tested it with 9,000+ concurrent viewers. ## Education ### Cornell University Master of Engineering (MEng), Computer Science 2026 – May 2027 · Ithaca, NY ### Dwarkadas J. Sanghvi College of Engineering B.Tech, Information Technology (Honors in DevOps) · GPA 8.87/10 2020 – 2024 · Mumbai, India Logistics Head at DJS Beats; Technical Committee Member at DJS Codestars ## Recent projects - **DevLog**: A local-first AI work logging CLI for developers. DevLog tracks your git history across multiple repos and branches into one unified timeline, generating professional markdown work logs for standups, PRs, and performance reviews. Features an interactive TUI console, smart commit summarization, and one-command Obsidian export for daily, weekly, and monthly notes. - **Roam: AI Tour Guide**: A mobile app that turns city walks into immersive, AI-narrated heritage tours. GPS-guided navigation takes you stop by stop, Gemini's vision model verifies landmarks through your camera, and stories are narrated in your choice of style and language with word-synced audio. You can even have a live voice conversation with your AI guide over WebRTC, powered by Gemini 2.5 Live and LiveKit. - **Adchemy**: An AI marketing team that actually knows your brand. Point Adchemy at your website, Instagram, or docs and it extracts your Brand Formula — colors, typography, voice, values, and audience — into a living creative brief. From there it generates on-brand images and campaigns, previews them in real social feeds, tracks competitor ads through the Meta Ad Library, and surfaces leads from relevant Reddit and Twitter conversations. - **The Overengineered Side-Project Stack**: A self-hosted PaaS that runs every side project on this page. After outgrowing Vercel's serverless limits and free-tier roulette on Fly.io and Railway, I rebuilt my deployment workflow around Dokploy on AWS EC2 — push-to-deploy with automatic SSL, Dockerized multi-service apps, secrets, and logs in one dashboard, plus a WireGuard VPN and a subtree monorepo with bootstrap scripts that can recreate the whole server on any VPS. Yes, it's overkill for projects with 3 users. That's the point. [All projects](https://ishaan812.com/projects.md) ## Achievements ### Hackathon Wins Winner at ETH India, Based Around the World – India, and Smart India Hackathon; bounty wins at Rift Rewind (Riot Games + AWS), Base Onchain Summer, EAS Onchain Summer, and ETH Mumbai. ### Open Source Contributor Active contributor across Entire.io, BuidlGuidl, AsyncAPI, and Postman Open Technologies; awarded Google Summer of Code 2023 to build the GitHub OpenAPI Search tool for Postman Labs. ## Writing Latest: [My Overengineered Side-Project Stack](https://ishaan812.com/blog/my-overengineered-side-project-stack.md) (Nov 28, 2025) — Why I moved my side projects off Vercel free tiers onto EC2 + Dokploy — and how self-hosting made me ship more, not less. [All posts](https://ishaan812.com/blog.md) ## Contact Email ics35@cornell.edu or [book a meeting](https://calendly.com/ishaan-shah-gjos/connect). ## Sitemap - [Markdown sitemap](https://ishaan812.com/sitemap.md) - [Agent index](https://ishaan812.com/llms.txt)