Shubhank Saxena

Software Engineer

Boston, MA •

About me

I'm a software engineer focused on building scalable products and systems that solve real problems. With a strong background in backend development, system architecture, and open-source collaboration, I enjoy turning complex ideas into reliable, thoughtful software. I like working across the stack, from designing robust infrastructure to shipping user-facing products, and building technology that connects with people and makes a real difference.

Work

First Round's On Me
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
Leading AI-powered incentives to drive personalized recommendations and engagement across the platform
Led technology pivot to a social-app business model; architected and delivered a production-ready backend in 2 months
Deployed open-source observability stack and built custom dashboards for application performance monitoring
Designed and launched internal analytics and B2B partner dashboards for actionable data insights
Owned blue-green deployment architecture with Tailscale-powered private VPN for zero-downtime releases
Backend Engineer Intern
2024 - 2024
Led end-to-end backend rewrite of a Django-based system, improving performance, scalability, and platform efficiency
Built and deployed a Grafana and Prometheus monitoring stack, contributing to 70% reduction in mean time to resolve critical issues
Developed an internal dashboard with natural-language query to database for self-serve data insights
Optimized database models and queries, reducing response times by 50% and improving data layer performance
Executed zero-downtime migration of 150k+ user records from legacy to new platform
Bullwhip
2023 - 2023
Backend Engineer
Developed an ETL pipeline that processed over 10,000 media articles daily, reporting performance metrics including clicks and views
Engineered an LLM-based system that processed data from 10 different API endpoints, enabling conversational data querying
Wall Inc.
2022 - 2023
Software Engineering Lead
2022 - 2023
Developed on-chain data gathering and community interaction features, attracting 10,000+ users in 48 hours and boosting engagement by 30%
Led a team of 5 developers delivering an end-to-end application, achieving 20% increase in operational efficiency and 15% reduction in time-to-market
Software Engineer
2022 - 2022
Developed queryable indexers for Ethereum and Polygon, processing over 1M transactions daily with rich off-chain metadata
Led dockerization of 3 key services, enhancing deployment efficiency by 40% and reducing server downtime by 50%
Optimized ETL pipelines, reducing storage costs by 60% through migration of 3TB+ legacy data to AWS S3
Lime Health Inc.
2021 - 2022
Backend Engineer (Contract)
Created a survey healthcare and patient (OPD) form management tool using Ruby on Rails, streamlining the survey process
Google Summer of Code
2021 - 2021
Open Source Developer
Segregated production and development environments for better local development without disturbing production CI
Integrated CI checks on code quality and unit tests, ensuring robustness and reliability
Added internationalization support for users from various geographies
Created a CLI-based tool for interacting with MediaCMS API endpoints
Indian Institute of Technology, Delhi
2021 - 2021
Research Intern
Created 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

Education

Northeastern University

2023 - 2025

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

2017 - 2021

Bachelor of Engineering, Electronics & Communication Engineering

Projects

Cisco Meraki DevNet App

Flutter-based 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
BlindSpot

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

Targeted at low-income usersMultiple AI models for different assistive tasksIntegrated payment system for accessibility
Pothole Detection •

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

44 stars on GitHubBuilt with Python, TensorFlow, and Mask R-CNNReal-world application for road safety
ASL Translator

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

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

Deep neural network for end-to-end automatic speech recognition pipeline using LibreSpeech dataset.

Converts raw audio to feature representations for ASRMaps audio features to transcribed textTrained on LibreSpeech dataset
Stress-ng REST Server •

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

REST API wrapper around stress-ng CLI toolSupport for time-varying stress testsDockerized for easy deployment

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 project initiative.
Mozilla

Open Source Developer

2020 - 2020

Contributed to Treeherder and OpenWPM projects.
HACKTIET

Head Organizer

2019 - 2019

Organized North India's largest hackathon with 50+ participants from 15+ cities. Sponsors included GitHub and Wolfram Alpha.
GirlScript Patiala

Core Member

2019 - 2020

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

Founder and Lead

2019 - 2020

Founded DSC chapter. Conducted 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.

Skills & Technologies

Python
C
C++
JavaScript
TypeScript
Bash
Go
Ruby
Django
Flask
React
Node
PyTorch
Pandas
NumPy
Terraform
Ansible
Docker
Kubernetes
Git
GitHub
Linux
PostgreSQL
Elasticsearch
Redis
Grafana
Prometheus
AWS
GCP

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

Awards & Hackathons

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

ETH New York

2023
Winner, Dune Analytics Category

ETH India 2022 (EthGlobal)

2022
Honorary Award, HackDelhi UltraHack 19

91 Springboard

2019
Winner, Smart India Hackathon 2019 (Software Edition)

Government of India — worked with CISCO on Meraki Camera data analysis

2019
Special Mention, HackData 2.0

Shiv Nadar University

2019
Winner, Hack36

Motilal Nehru National Institute of Engineering and Technology, Allahabad

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

Innovacer and Amazon — NCR's biggest hack

2018
Winner, HashHacks 3.0

Delhi University CIC — Delhi's biggest Hackathon

2019

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