PrudhviNikku

Backend & ML Engineer

Distributed Systems • LLMs • Microservices

Nashville, Tennessee, United States
Open to Work

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

Achievements

4+
Years Experience
Software Engineering
12M
Daily Active Users
Platforms powered at RedBus
$500K
Annual Revenue
RedPass campaign generated
40%
Performance Boost
Inference throughput 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 3M queries/second 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

Meta

Extern — Capstone Project

Amherst, MA

February 2025 – May 2025
  • Generated 100K+ synthetic personas and persona-aware Math QA pairs using zero-shot, few-shot, and POT prompting boosting diversity by 10% via increased unique 1-grams and fine-tuned Llama models using LoRA using HF, wandb.
  • Accelerated LLM inference throughput by 40% by engineering an asynchronous multiprocessing pipeline integrating Together AI and OpenRouter APIs, reducing latency for large-scale workloads.

RedBus

Software Engineer – Backend Distributed Systems

Bengaluru, India

June 2022 – July 2023
  • Designed RedPass Go microservice and integrated with Java/.NET booking flows; unified opt-in and payment logic, enabling 10K+ daily purchases and $500K+ annual revenue.
  • Maintained and revamped 20+ high-throughput microservices across Personalization, Search and Booking services written in Java/Go/.NET handling 3M+ queries per second for 12M daily users.
  • Delivered a geospatial "Nearby Boarding Point" feature in search service used by 50K+ monthly riders.
  • Optimized and migrated RabbitMQ-based schedulers from Windows to Linux machines, reducing AWS costs by $600/year and improving operational efficiency across notification systems.

Tata Consultancy Services

Software Engineer

Hyderabad, India

August 2020 – June 2022
  • Engineered custom wrapper APIs in C# and WCF, eliminating redundant XML fields and metadata, reducing average payload size from 40KB to 20KB (50% decrease) and boosting backend data throughput by 10%.
  • Implemented unit and functional tests for 15+ features, boosting release quality by 15% with QA and product teams.
  • Developed 30+ UI pages in .NET, improving operator experience and shopfloor workflow efficiency.

PiChain Labs

Software Engineering Intern

Bengaluru, India

January 2020 – June 2020
  • Led backend development of a KYC/AML engine for 3+ clients, delivering 10+ production-grade REST APIs using Flask, MongoDB, and deploying services on AWS EC2 to enhance compliance and risk mitigation.
  • Architected a scalable Knowledge Graph system using Neo4j, Python (Py2Neo, CQL), enabling advanced relationship modeling for regulatory entities and improving AML insights.

IBM Research

Machine Learning Intern

Sricity, India

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

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

Deep Research Assistant

AI-powered research assistant that delivers comprehensive, real-time analysis on any topic.

Technologies:

Next.js
React.js
FastAPI
Cerebras
Exa
Python

Skills

Languages

Python
Go
Java
C#
JavaScript
TypeScript
C
SQL
CQL
JSON
YAML

Frontend

React
Next.js
HTML
CSS

Backend

REST API
gRPC
GraphQL
Django
Flask
.NET Core
Java REST
Node.js

ML/AI

PyTorch
Scikit-learn
Huggingface
Transformers
vLLM
Numpy
Pandas
LangChain

Infrastructure

Docker
Kubernetes
Git
Jenkins
ELK
Postman
AWS
Bitbucket
Jira
GitHub
Unix
Windows
Agile
Cursor

Databases

MySQL
PostgreSQL
MongoDB
Redis
Neo4J
Kafka
RabbitMQ
Pinecone
Supabase

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:

Software Engineer
Software Developer
Senior Software Engineer
Machine Learning Engineer
AI Engineer