Everyone gets asked the question in the title, usually as the first step in getting to know someone new. I've been asked it enough times that I decided to write down my "ideal answer."

I'm a Computer Science Engineering graduate from VIT Chennai, where I specialised in Artificial Intelligence and Robotics. I work as a Research Officer at A*STAR's Quantum Innovation Centre in Singapore, on scientific ML pipelines and cloud data systems for the GNOME dark matter detection project.

But that's just the formal version.

The more useful version is that I like building the whole thing. At A*STAR I wrote the preprocessing pipeline, I run the AWS infrastructure under it, and I built the portal physicists use to download the data. I like working across those layers, because the interesting problems tend to sit between them.

What I've worked on

At A*STAR I work with magnetometer data from the GNOME network. I profile large HDF5 datasets, build preprocessing systems, reproduce reference outputs, and validate ML baselines on GPUs.

Before A*STAR I built a live e-commerce store with Razorpay payments, CoreML blur detection for an iOS camera app, a YouTube downloader extension that runs entirely in the browser, and a voice wake routine for Codex.

I care about intelligent systems, and I care just as much about whether someone can use, debug, explain and extend them after the demo.

Where I come from

I'm originally from Delhi, but that's a little misleading, because I've only lived there for around five years in total.

I come from a defence background. My dad is a gazetted officer in the Indian Navy, so I moved around a lot growing up. Vizag, Mumbai, Wellington near Ooty, Delhi, and then Chennai for college. A lot of my childhood happened around ports and naval communities.

My mother is a homemaker and runs a small business, Nandiniz'Aura. She has also been very active in the Naval Wives Welfare Association (NWWA). She's an artist at heart, and that has rubbed off on my brother too.

Ooh yes, I have a younger brother. He's doing his Bachelor's in Industrial and Architectural Design.

My parents have very different jobs, and both are demanding. Watching them taught me to take responsibility and to show up properly for people.

Moving that often made me good at adapting. New city, new school, new people, new social rules. You learn how to listen, how to introduce yourself without making it awkward, and how to be useful in a room you just walked into.

That carried into work. I'm comfortable on new teams, in new cities, and with problems nobody has defined yet.

Communication and collaboration

Behind the technical work there's a lot of non-technical practice. I've done public speaking, held leadership roles, worked on an editorial board, managed events and edited video for a student team.

That matters because code gets built with other people. Someone has to explain the idea, make the calls, and carry it from a vague thought to something people can use.

Personal notes

I speak Hindi and English natively, and some French.

Outside work I spend a lot of time on podcasts and videos from Theo Browne, ThePrimeagen, Linus Tech Tips, MKBHD, 3Blue1Brown, Cleo Abram and Veritasium. I also like trekking, working out, reading, music, and tinkering with whatever tool or idea is stuck in my head.

The thread across most of my life is adaptation. New places, new teams, new domains. I've had a lot of practice walking into unfamiliar territory and finding a way to contribute.

Right now I'm looking for full-time roles in Singapore, across agentic development, AI/ML engineering, software engineering, data engineering and GenAI product development.