Software & AI Engineer · Charleston, SC

Ajinkya
More.

I build production AI systems — voice platforms, LLM infrastructure, and the quiet, durable backends that make them actually work in the wild.

CurrentlyBetter Collision Centers
RoleFounding Engineer, AI Voice
BasedCharleston, South Carolina
01 — The Now

What I'm building.

Active · Oct 2025 →

As Founding Engineer at Better Collision Centers, I'm shipping an omnichannel AI assistant on Twilio SIP that handles real customer conversations across voice and SMS — with the boring, important things (retries, idempotency, monitoring) treated as first-class concerns.

The interesting work sits underneath: an LLM-driven scheduler with feedback loops that has pulled cycle time from 15 days to 10, and a backend where model outputs cleanly trigger downstream operational decisions. AWS, RBAC, audit-ready.

02 — In the lab

A current obsession.

Ongoing · Exploratory
PROMPT → 8-QUBIT REGISTER → TICKS RECORDED → REPLAY → ?

Quantum-native AI cognition. An experiment in whether a model can think — not just respond — through a qubit substrate.

The setup: an 8-qubit register runs alongside the prompt. As the model reasons, the circuit ticks. I capture those ticks as a kind of cognitive signature, then replay them against an unrelated question to see whether a thought-pattern — a mood — can be carried across prompts.

Open questions: can the quantum state genuinely steer the model's conclusions, or am I just measuring noise dressed up as cognition? Early days, mostly notebooks, careful controls, and a healthy skepticism.

03 — Selected work

A path through systems.

2025 → Now
Founding Engineer, AI Voice Platform
Better Collision Centers · Charleston, SC
  • Shipped a production omnichannel AI assistant (voice / SMS) on Twilio SIP with retries, idempotency, and monitoring — CSI up 30%.
  • Built an LLM-driven scheduling system with feedback loops; cycle time 15 → 10 days.
  • Designed AI → action pipelines where model outputs trigger downstream scheduling and validation, automating operational decisions.
  • Led AWS architecture — RDS, DynamoDB, App Runner — with RBAC, monitoring, and backup strategies for audit-ready production.
2025
Applied AI Scientist, Founding Team
New Territory Inc · Fort Wayne, IN
  • Designed a Mixture-of-Experts LLM with gated top-k routing — 1.7× throughput, training cost down 20%.
  • Built a production RAG pipeline with role-aware retrieval, sharply reducing hallucinations in legal workflows.
  • Developed an automated LLM evaluation framework (robustness, adversarial testing) wired to an RBAC backend with audit logging.
  • Optimized data quality pipelines (dedup, PII filtering) and dataset sharding across AWS Glue, S3, SageMaker.
2024 → 2025
Research Assistant, Adversarial NLP
Purdue University · Fort Wayne, IN
  • Fine-tuned 50+ LLMs (BERT, ALBERT, LLaMA 3, GPT-Neo) for classification — benchmarked LoRA vs. full fine-tuning.
  • Built an automated adversarial pipeline running BAE, TextFooler, TextBugger; measured attack success, query efficiency, perturbation budgets.
  • Produced reproducible evaluation reports comparing model robustness for deployment selection.
2021 → 2023
Software Engineer, Internal Platforms
Tata Consultancy Services / CIBC · Mumbai, India
  • Built a Java / Spring Boot backend (gRPC + Protobuf) for CIBC's decisions platform — 7,500+ applications/day at P95 84 ms.
  • Real-time decisioning with rules engine + async validations — time-to-decision 0.5 hrs → 30 sec, auto-approval +12pp.
  • Strengthened credit-risk validation (CB merges, income / LTV / DTI checks) — post-decision overturns down 30%.
  • Redis location-aware caching for mortgage workflows — 88% hit rate, backend load −22%.
  • Policy-based access control for AWS data lake (S3, IAM) — secure onboarding for 10+ teams with centralized audit logging.
04 — The toolkit

Tools of the trade.

Languages
Go Python Java SQL JavaScript
AI & ML
RAG LLM Evaluation Prompt Engineering Retrieval Systems PyTorch Hugging Face Adversarial Testing Mixture-of-Experts
Backend
FastAPI Spring Boot gRPC Node.js Protobuf
Cloud & infra
AWS S3 DynamoDB Redshift Glue SageMaker App Runner Docker Kubernetes Kafka Redis RBAC
05 — Foundations

Where I learned.

M.S. Computer Science — Thesis
Purdue University · Fort Wayne, IN
Aug 2023 → Aug 2025