Open to Work

Prudhvi
Nikku

Backend & ML Engineer

Distributed Systems • LLMs • Microservices

Austin, Texas, United States

Building AI-powered systems at scale • MS CS UMass '25 • Seeking Full-Time Roles

Achievements

4+
Years Experience
Professional Software Engineering
500K+
Daily Active Users
Services maintained at RedBus
$438K
Annual Revenue
RedPass subscription service generated
40%
Performance Boost
Inference throughput optimization at Meta

About

Overview

I build backend systems and ML infrastructure that scale to millions of users. Just completed my MS in Computer Science at UMass Amherst (May 2025), including a capstone project with Meta where I generated 100K+ diverse personas using zero-shot/few-shot prompting for LLM training, accelerated inference throughput by 40% through async multiprocessing, and fine-tuned LLaMA models using LoRA.

What Drives Me

The intersection of distributed systems and AI. I'm passionate about building infrastructure that makes ML systems production-ready at scale. Whether it's handling 50K requests per minute or optimizing LLM inference, I care about performance, reliability, and real-world impact.

What I'm Looking For

Full-time Backend Engineer or ML Engineer roles. I'm particularly interested in companies building LLM infrastructure and AI applications, distributed systems at scale, and roles that blend systems engineering with machine learning.

Experience

M

Meta

Extern — Capstone Project

February 2025 – May 2025
Amherst, MA
  • Generated 100K+ synthetic personas and persona-aware Math QA pairs using zero-shot, few-shot, and program-of-thought prompting, demonstrating improved accuracy and diversity metrics over baseline Tencent Persona Hub dataset through unique 1-gram analysis and compression ratios.
  • Accelerated LLM inference throughput by 40% by engineering an asynchronous multiprocessing pipeline integrating Together AI and OpenRouter APIs, reducing latency for large-scale workloads.
  • Fine-tuned LLaMA models (3.1-8B, 3B, 1B) using LoRA on persona-driven datasets, evaluating performance using LM Evaluation Harness framework across multiple benchmarks.
R

RedBus

Software Engineer – Backend Distributed Systems

June 2022 – July 2023
Bengaluru, India
  • Designed and launched RedPass subscription microservice in Go, creating RESTful APIs for payment processing and user management—enabled 10K+ daily purchases generating $438K in annual revenue.
  • Maintained and optimized 20+ production microservices (Java/Go/.NET) serving 500K+ daily active users at 50K requests/minute, participating in on-call rotations and debugging production issues to ensure service reliability.
  • Integrated RedPass with existing Java/.NET booking systems using REST APIs and message queues (RabbitMQ), ensuring seamless data flow across 5+ services while maintaining backward compatibility.
  • Engineered user segmentation system personalizing payment options based on user behavior and demographics, improving conversion rates by 15% through targeted payment method recommendations.
  • Delivered geospatial 'Nearby Boarding Point' feature in search service used by 50K+ monthly riders, enhancing travel convenience.
  • Optimized and migrated RabbitMQ-based schedulers from Windows to Linux machines, reducing AWS operational costs by $600/year and improving system efficiency.
TC

Tata Consultancy Services

Software Engineer – Backend Systems

August 2020 – June 2022
Hyderabad, India
  • Developed backend systems and APIs for Camstar manufacturing execution platform at Johnson & Johnson, supporting production operations processing 1,000+ daily manufacturing orders written in .NET Core, MsMQ, MsSQL Server.
  • Built API wrapper layer in C#/WCF reducing XML payload sizes by 50% (40KB → 20KB) and improving data throughput by 10%, enabling real-time communication between manufacturing floor and enterprise systems.
  • Integrated Camstar MES with external quality and inventory systems using WCF web services, automating data exchange across 5 critical manufacturing processes and eliminating manual data entry for 100+ operators.
  • Created 30+ workflow pages using .NET Designer and optimized database queries through indexing and caching strategies, improving system response time by 10% for production floor operations.
PL

PiChain Labs

Software Engineering Intern

January 2020 – June 2020
Bengaluru, India
  • Built backend infrastructure for KYC/AML compliance engine serving 5 enterprise financial services clients, delivering 10+ REST APIs using Flask, MongoDB on AWS EC2, processing 1,500+ daily verifications.
  • Designed Neo4j Knowledge Graph for regulatory compliance tracking 12,000+ business entities and relationships, implementing automated PEP screening, sanctions checking, and money laundering pattern detection.
  • Engineered document processing service using machine learning and computer vision to classify legal documents and identify US state of origin, enhancing document processing efficiency for compliance workflows.
IR

IBM Research

Machine Learning Intern

June 2019 – November 2019
Sricity, India
  • Improved aggressive behavior detection accuracy by 5-13% using deep neural networks and Convolutional-LSTMs for spatio-temporal video modeling in surveillance systems.
  • Experimented with Faster R-CNN for handgun detection in surveillance videos to study threat recognition in real-time video analysis applications.

Education

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Master of Science: Computer Science

Amherst, MA
GPA: 3.82/4.0
September 2023 – May 2025

Coursework: Distributed Systems, Advanced NLP, Systems for Deep Learning, Reinforcement Learning, Software Engineering

Highlights:

  • Capstone project with Meta on LLM persona generation and optimization
  • Focus on Distributed Systems and AI/ML infrastructure

Indian Institute of Information Technology, Sricity

Bachelor of Technology: Computer Science and Engineering

Sricity, India
July 2016 – June 2020

Coursework: Data Structures & Algorithms, Operating Systems, Machine Learning, Databases, Web Development

Projects

September 2025

Deep Research Assistant

Built AI research assistant with FastAPI and Next.js 15, integrating Exa API for web search and Cerebras Cloud (Llama 4) for real-time streaming analy...

Next.js
FastAPI
TypeScript
Python
LangChain
May 2024

Emotion Cause Pair Extraction

Explored and evaluated a question-answering paradigm for Emotion-Cause Pair Extraction (ECPE) as part of SemEval 2024 Task 3. Introduced innovative me...

PyTorch
Python
Hugging Face
PEFT
December 2024

Deep RL Algorithms Implementation

Implemented and benchmarked advanced reinforcement learning algorithms including REINFORCE with Baseline, One-Step Actor-Critic, PPO, and N-step SARSA...

Python
PyTorch
OpenAI Gym
December 2024

URL Shortener Service

Built URL shortening service in Go with PostgreSQL backend, implementing short code generation algorithm, 302 redirect functionality, and custom slug...

Go
PostgreSQL
REST API

Skills

Languages

8
Python
Go
Java
C#
JavaScript
TypeScript

Frontend

4
React
Next.js
HTML/CSS
TypeScript

Backend

8
REST API
gRPC
GraphQL
Flask
FastAPI
Django

ML/AI

8
PyTorch
Hugging Face Transformers
LangChain
vLLM
Scikit-learn
NumPy

Infrastructure

7
Docker
Kubernetes
AWS (EC2, S3, Lambda)
Git
Jenkins
ELK Stack

Databases

7
PostgreSQL
MySQL
MongoDB
Redis
Neo4j
Kafka

Metrics & Analytics

GitHub Stats

Portfolio Metrics

Get In Touch

I'm always open to discussing new opportunities, interesting projects, or just having a chat!

Open to roles:

Backend Engineer
ML Engineer
Software Engineer
AI Infrastructure Engineer