Shubhank Saxena

Software Engineer, Backend & Infrastructure

Boston, MA •

About me

I'm a backend and infrastructure engineer. Most of my work lives in the layer that keeps products running: rewriting services for scale, standing up observability, and shipping zero-downtime migrations and deploys. I currently lead technology at First Round's On Me, an early-stage social-app startup, where I took the backend from a business pivot to production in two months. Running alongside that is a longer thread I care about: assistive technology. I hold three patents and have built tools for people who are blind or navigating autism, turning hard accessibility problems into software that ships.

Work

First Round's On Me

Early-stage social-app startup

2024 - Present
Vice President of Technology
2025 - Present
Lead a cross-functional team of 4 (1 designer, 2 frontend engineers, 1 backend intern), aligning product, design, and engineering
Building an AI-powered incentives system that drives personalized recommendations across the platform
Led the technology pivot to a social-app business model; architected and shipped a production-ready backend in 2 months
Deployed an open-source observability stack with custom dashboards for application performance and uptime monitoring
Designed and launched internal analytics and B2B partner dashboards
Built blue-green deployments over a Tailscale-backed private network for zero-downtime releases
Backend Engineer (Intern)
2024 - 2024
Led an end-to-end rewrite of a Django-based backend, restructuring it for scale
Stood up a Grafana + Prometheus monitoring stack, cutting mean time to resolve critical incidents by ~70%
Built an internal dashboard with natural-language querying over the database for self-serve insights
Optimized database models and queries, cutting response times by ~50%
Ran a zero-downtime migration of 150k+ user records from the legacy platform
Bullwhip

News & media analytics

2023 - 2023
Backend Engineer (Internship)
Built an ETL pipeline processing 10,000+ media articles daily, surfacing performance metrics like clicks and views
Engineered an LLM-based system over 10 API sources to enable conversational data querying
Wall Inc.

Web3 social platform

2022 - 2023
Software Engineering Lead
2022 - 2023
Shipped on-chain data and community features that drew 10,000+ users in 48 hours
Led a team of 5 engineers delivering the application end to end, from design to launch
Software Engineer
2022 - 2022
Built queryable indexers for Ethereum and Polygon, processing 1M+ transactions daily with off-chain metadata
Containerized 3 core services with Docker, streamlining deploys and reducing downtime
Migrated 3TB+ of legacy data to AWS S3 and tuned ETL pipelines, cutting storage costs by ~60%
Lime Health Inc.

Healthcare technology

2021 - 2022
Backend Engineer (Contract)
Built a healthcare survey and patient (OPD) form-management tool in Ruby on Rails, streamlining the survey process
Google Summer of Code

2021 - 2021
Open Source Developer
Separated production and development environments for safer local development without disturbing the production CI
Added CI checks for code quality and unit tests, improving robustness and reliability
Added internationalization support for users across geographies
Built a CLI tool for interacting with the MediaCMS API
Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi

2021 - 2021
Research Intern
Built an AI-driven inflatable jacket to assist autistic individuals during anxiety attacks, monitoring physiological and bio-signals and simulating a hug to provide comfort
Major League Hacking

2020 - 2020
Open Source Fellow
Selected as one of 100 from 20,000 applicants for the Open Source Fellowship
Created WellIO.jl, a Julia package for parsing and reading ASCII Log oil-well drilling data

Skills & Technologies

Languages

Python
Go
TypeScript
JavaScript
C++
C
Ruby
Bash

Backend & Frameworks

Django
Flask
Node
React

Data & Storage

PostgreSQL
Redis
Elasticsearch

Infra & DevOps

Docker
Kubernetes
Terraform
Ansible
Linux
Git

Cloud & Observability

AWS
GCP
Grafana
Prometheus

ML & Data Science

PyTorch
Pandas
NumPy

Projects

Twitter/X MCP Server •

MCP server that lets AI assistants interact with Twitter/X accounts using browser cookie authentication instead of API keys.

No API key required, cookie-based auth via twikit20+ tools: tweets, engagement, discovery, media supportCompatible with Claude Code and Claude Desktop
Pothole Detection •

Computer-vision system for detecting potholes from road imagery using Mask R-CNN.

44+ stars on GitHubBuilt with Python, TensorFlow, and Mask R-CNNReal-world application for road safety
Stress-ng REST Server •

Flask REST server wrapping stress-ng for configurable compute, storage, and network stress tests with time-varying parameters.

REST API wrapper around the stress-ng CLISupports time-varying stress profilesDockerized for easy deployment
BlindSpot

All-in-one assistive device for visually impaired users: scene description, OCR, navigation, path detection, and integrated payments.

Designed for low-income usersMultiple AI models across assistive tasksIntegrated payment system for accessibility
Cisco Meraki DevNet App

Flutter cross-platform app for Meraki camera data analysis and queue prediction using LSTM.

Integrated Google Assistant, Alexa, and automated SMS/email alertsLocal-language support for accessibilityWinner at Smart India Hackathon 2019
ASL Translator

Sign-language alphabet recognizer using Python, OpenCV, and a TensorFlow InceptionV3 CNN for classification.

Real-time sign-language recognition via webcamTrained an InceptionV3 model for classificationBuilt with OpenCV and TensorFlow
Speech Recognition DNN

Deep neural network for an end-to-end automatic speech recognition pipeline using the LibriSpeech dataset.

Converts raw audio into feature representations for ASRMaps audio features to transcribed textTrained on the LibriSpeech dataset

Patents

Braille Reading Device

Indian Patent Office (IN 202011048731)

2020
Communication Device for Visually Impaired People

Indian Patent Office (IN 201911002961)

2019
System to Provide Assistance in Autism Spectrum Disorder

Indian Patent Office (IN 202111028802)

2021

Writing

I write about backend engineering, infrastructure, and building with AI: lessons pulled from shipping real systems.

Read on Substack →

Education

Northeastern University

2023 - 2025

Master of Science, Information Systems
Thapar Institute of Engineering and Technology

2017 - 2021

Bachelor of Engineering, Electronics & Communication Engineering

Awards & Hackathons

Winner, Smart India Hackathon 2019 (Software Edition)

Government of India, built Meraki camera data analysis with CISCO

2019
Winner, Dune Analytics Category

ETH India 2022 (ETHGlobal)

2022
2nd Runner-up, Unlock Protocol and IPFS Pool Bounty

ETH New York (ETHGlobal)

2023
Winner, HashHacks 3.0

Delhi University CIC, Delhi's biggest hackathon

2019
Winner, Hack36

Motilal Nehru National Institute of Technology, Allahabad

2019
2nd Runner-up, Innovacer HackerCup (Hackercamp 18)

Innovacer and Amazon, NCR's biggest hack

2018
Honorary Award, HackDelhi UltraHack 19

91 Springboard

2019
Special Mention, HackData 2.0

Shiv Nadar University

2019

Volunteer

IEEE NCU

Guest Speaker

2021 - 2021

Gave a talk on open-source learning and contributions.
DSC NSEC

Open Source Mentor, Winter of Code

2020 - 2021

Mentored students for the Tesseract open-source initiative.
Mozilla

Open Source Developer

2020 - 2020

Contributed to the Treeherder and OpenWPM projects.
HACKTIET

Head Organizer

2019 - 2019

Organized North India's largest hackathon with participants from 15+ cities. Sponsors included GitHub and Wolfram Alpha.
GirlScript Patiala

Core Member

2019 - 2020

Ran girls-focused hackathons and industry expert talks.
Developer Student Club Thapar

Founder and Lead

2019 - 2020

Founded the DSC chapter. Ran programming boot camps, workshops, and the "RawTalent" podcast series.
Amazon India

Alexa Student Influencer

2019 - 2020

Promoted Alexa skills development and voice-first technology among students.
Har Hath Kalam

Teaching Professional

2018 - 2019

Taught underprivileged students mathematics, science, and social studies.

Certifications

Machine Learning - Introduction Nanodegree

Udacity
Natural Language Processing Nanodegree

Udacity
React: Getting Started

Pluralsight
Intermediate Python for Data Science

DataCamp
Python Data Science Toolbox

DataCamp
Programming for Everybody (Getting Started with Python)

Coursera