About meThe person behind the systems

Engineering, with the whole picture in mind.

Making complex
systems work
for people.

I’m Ishank, a Forward Deployed Engineer. I turn ambiguous problems into useful AI products, connecting customer workflows, backend systems, and the details that make them work in production.

Interconnected layers representing the path from understanding a problem to building and shipping a system
Understand. Build. Ship.
Resume GitHub LinkedIn

Currently at Prentis AI

From discovery to production.

Forward Deployed Engineer at Prentis AI, building AI-powered products from discovery to production.

My foundation is backend and data engineering. My focus now is applied AI that earns its place in a real workflow. I like clear interfaces, recoverable failures, and software people can trust.

Tools of the trade

Across AI, data, and infrastructure

  • Python
  • Java
  • JavaScript
  • Node.js
  • MongoDB
  • Redis
  • Snowflake
  • Databricks
  • AWS
  • Docker
  • React
  • LangChain

Resume

Education

  1. California State University, Long Beach

    Aug 2024 — May 2026

    Master of Science in Computer Science · GPA 3.9 / 4.0

  2. Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bengaluru

    Aug 2017 — May 2021

    B.E. in Information Science and Engineering

Experience

  1. Forward Deployed Engineer — Prentis AI

    Jun 2026 — Present

    Building AI-powered products from discovery to production.

  2. Forward Deployed Engineer — CommerceIQ

    Feb 2026 — May 2026

    Built a multi-tenant analytics platform for executive dashboards, with causal analysis and guarded GPT-generated insights. Productionized Ally, an executive-summary system using GPT-4o.

  3. Instructional Student Assistant — Explainable & Ethical AI, CSULB

    Sep 2025 — May 2026

    Teaching assistant for Explainable & Ethical AI; supported labs, grading, and student guidance on model interpretability.

  4. Full‑Stack Engineer Intern — GrowthAlpha

    May 2025 — Jul 2025

    Built a multi‑tenant SaaS from 0→1 with a custom JSON‑to‑SQL query generator; prototyped Text‑to‑SQL with open‑source LLMs; shipped on AWS.

  5. Research Assistant — CSULB, College of Business

    Feb 2025 — May 2025

    Neuromarketing research: generated real‑time gaze heatmaps on video saliency datasets (TurkerGaze) and explored attention patterns.

  6. Software Development Engineer II — CommerceIQ

    Sep 2023 — Aug 2024

    Built an AWS‑based media budget recommendation pipeline (Step Functions, SQS, Lambda, 40 SQL modules) saving $200K/yr and cutting processing time from 1 day to 3 minutes; delivered cold‑start recommendations with 90% accuracy; migrated budget prediction Snowflake→Databricks (−52% cost, −80% latency).

  7. Software Development Engineer I — CommerceIQ

    Aug 2021 — Jul 2023

    Engineered an Amazon ads campaign platform and an automated strategy pipeline for Criteo ads, reducing manual ops by 60%.

  8. Software Engineer Intern — CommerceIQ

    Feb 2021 — May 2021

    Simulated Snowflake multi‑cluster workloads to test concurrency; built TP99 performance dashboards with New Relic.

Portfolio

A selection of things I’ve built, explored, and put to work.


Blog

Latest articles from my Medium publications


Loading articles...

Awards

Hackathons & Achievements

  1. CommerceIQ AI Hackathon

    Honorable Mention

    Leveraged LLMs to classify product reviews by sentiment, enabling direct competitor comparisons and actionable insights for strategic brand positioning.

  2. Smart India Hackathon

    Winner (Team Avocado)

    Created solutions for the National Crime Records Bureau to "digitalize, automate, and optimize daily operations of Indian police."

  3. Microsoft IncubateIND Innovation Series Hackathon

    Runner Up

    Extended Women Suraksha project using MapmyIndia APIs to alert family/emergency services in case of distress.

  4. GE Healthcare Precision Hackathon

    Honorable Mention

    Focused on hospital internal workflow automation, successfully reducing patient wait times.

  5. Reverie Language Hackathon

    Runner Up

    Used Reverie translation APIs to facilitate real-time communication between speakers of different languages.

  6. IEEE Ideathon

    Runner Up

    Project focused on solving key societal needs.

Contact

Ready to collaborate, discuss opportunities, or just chat about tech? I'd love to hear from you!

Email

ishankdev@gmail.com

Drop me a line anytime!

LinkedIn

Connect with me

Professional networking

GitHub

@ishank-dev

Check out my code

Based in Los Angeles

Building at Prentis AI. M.S. Computer Science, CSULB ’26.

Send a Message

Have a project in mind or want to discuss opportunities? Let's start a conversation!

Opens your email app with a draft. You review it before sending.