Full-stack & applied AI engineer

Explore the work

Hello, I’m

Ashwin
Chembu.

ProductApplied AIData systems
↘
Based in San Francisco, CaliforniaInterfaces · Services · Data

San Francisco · Open to building what matters

From messy context
to working software.

I build practical AI-enabled products, backend systems, and thoughtful user experiences—from document intelligence and automation to real-time, data-driven applications.

Showing a balanced view of secure integrations, retrieval-grounded products, data pipelines, and clearly labeled supporting work.

Across the stack

React✦Next.js✦TypeScript✦Python✦FastAPI✦Node.js✦Express✦REST APIs✦OpenAPI✦MCP✦WebSockets✦RAG✦LangChain✦AWS Bedrock✦Pinecone✦FAISS✦SQL✦Snowflake✦MongoDB✦Firebase✦AWS✦Three.js✦Playwright✦

Featured case studies

Selected work.

Five selected projects spanning secure handoffs, grounded AI, multi-tenant products and reliable workflows.

More to explore.

More engineering, interactive interfaces, and collaborative tools.

Technology map

A compact view of the stack.

InterfacesReact · TypeScript
ServicesPython · FastAPI · Node.js · Express
Data & cloudMongoDB · Firebase · AWS · S3
Applied AIRAG · Vector search · Grounding
IntegrationsREST APIs · OpenAPI · MCP · Webhooks
Quality & deliverypytest · Vitest · Playwright · Render

Project archive

Browse more projects and collaborations.

Explore all projects and implementation details

Private organization product · 2025—Present

Sylk

A complete React/Capacitor Android supply-chain application spanning organization onboarding, authentication, line-item shipments, fulfillment, inventory, billing, file collaboration, team access, and real-time messaging.

React 19 · TypeScript · Firebase · Capacitor · Android · Security rules · Playwright
Android delivery, multi-tenancy & testing
  • Adapted onboarding, authentication, retailer/manufacturer workflows, orders, inventory, billing, chat, files, team access, drawers, and list/detail navigation for phone-sized use.
  • Implemented native-safe routing, Capacitor Firebase Authentication, safe-area handling, legacy Android WebView/CSS fallbacks, and mobile file-picker compatibility.
  • Enforced organization isolation and least-privilege Firestore and Storage rules, including retailer-only financial data and constrained factory fulfillment updates.
  • Designed unit and component tests, emulator-backed security-rule tests, and Playwright journeys covering organization creation through shipment, fulfillment, and chat; produced a working com.sylk.app debug APK.
  • Maintained cross-platform integration with an iOS project scaffold; signed builds, TestFlight and App Store release are not established.

Private organization product. Android debug packaging is established; store releases and a shipped iOS application are not claimed.

Collaborative research tools · Mar 2023—Jun 2025

Tech4Good FigJam Toolkit

Team-developed FigJam collaboration tools for threaded chat, anonymous responses, polling and research-ready spreadsheet exports.

TypeScript · Figma API · FigJam widgets · Node.js / Express · MongoDB · Excel / XLSX · Python / Pandas
Verified contribution & widget-system details
  • Built and iterated chat, text-entry, polling, carousel, radar, Likert, tooltip, and Excel/XLSX modules using TypeScript, Figma APIs, esbuild, dynamic styling, and synchronized state.
  • Implemented threaded chat, edits, anonymous responses, bulk loading, voting, multi-select polls, vote changes, grouped widgets, admin controls, and Node/Express/MongoDB persistence and logs.
  • Used MongoDB change streams and three logical databases to synchronize chat, text-entry and polling state.
  • Analyzed 43,340 anonymized interaction rows across 2,805 sessions with Python and Pandas.
  • Built Power BI and Tableau research dashboards and contributed a responsive Angular career-exploration component.
  • Coauthored the ICER 2024 paper and the accepted/upcoming ACM SIGCSE TS 2027 paper listed below.

Collaborator-owned source and team-published resources. The six Community listings showed approximately 12.2K aggregate uses in July 2026; this is a team-library measure.

Independent product · Jul—Aug 2026

Job Hub

Workflow platform with a React/TypeScript interface, Cloudflare Worker API, D1 persistence, revision-aware updates, idempotent events and evidence-grounded AI interview feedback.

React · TypeScript · Cloudflare Workers · D1 · OpenAI Responses API · Python · LaTeX / Tectonic
Validation, rendering & exception review
  • Built a responsive React/TypeScript interface over a Cloudflare Worker API and D1 persistence.
  • Used revision-aware updates and idempotent actions to recover from stale saves and duplicate events.
  • Bound generated artifacts to immutable content hashes and explicit workflow states.
  • Validated routine application packages against evidence, source and exact-artifact checks; used exception-only review for genuine judgment or access blockers.
  • Built a version-5 Python-to-LaTeX resume pipeline with Tectonic, source fingerprints, ATS extraction and rendered-page quality checks.
  • Integrated structured AI interview feedback, progressive hints and reproducible coding-practice journals.

Architecture summary only; personal application records, recruiter data, journals and operational artifacts remain private.

Anonymized employer case study · 327K+ / 67K+ records

Healthcare Data Quality & MDM

An anonymized healthcare-data case study covering Snowflake pipelines, layered ETL/MDM, provider and organization identifiers, entity resolution, reconciliation, and stewardship-ready evidence.

Snowflake · SQL · ETL / MDM · Entity resolution · API lookups · Data quality
Matching, quality & stewardship details
  • Profiled healthcare-provider and organization data to identify missing identifiers, duplicates, conflicting affiliations, and address or license quality issues.
  • Designed deterministic and scored rules for duplicate resolution, state and address selection, survivorship proposals, and stewardship review.
  • Built API-assisted lookup checkpoints and traceable input, output, exception, and validation datasets with business-readable summaries and review materials.

Anonymized employer evidence; no client identity, private data, screenshots, SQL, or proprietary artifacts are published.

Anonymized employer case study · Private artifacts

CRM Workflow & UAT Delivery

An anonymized delivery case study turning stakeholder meetings, CRM metadata, live application behavior, and regulated workflows into requirements, UAT evidence, user guides, and implementation-ready backlogs.

CRM metadata · UAT · Acceptance criteria · React / Vite · Decision logs · User guides
Validation, UAT & handoff details
  • Synthesized meeting recordings and stakeholder feedback into structured requirements, completed-work summaries, open issues, owners, and timelines.
  • Inspected CRM metadata and live application behavior to validate fields, layouts, approval and read-only workflows, and implementation gaps.
  • Maintained UAT and enhancement trackers with acceptance criteria, evidence, prioritization, implementation status, user guides, and executive-ready communication.
  • Implemented account-plan submission, manager review, approval history and timestamps in React/JavaScript workflows.
  • Added cached refresh recovery and explicit retry while rejecting obsolete responses and resetting readiness when the selected plan changes.

Anonymized employer evidence; no client identity, screenshots, transcripts, credentials, or private CRM artifacts are published.

Independent platform · Jun—Aug 2026

Private Filedrop

Secure cross-device file exchange with version history, local and S3-compatible storage, REST/OpenAPI/MCP integrations, shared mailboxes, and HMAC-signed webhooks.

Node.js · Express · AWS SDK · OpenAPI · MCP · HMAC
Architecture & security details
  • Implemented categories, tags, project paths, file metadata, version history, unguessable downloads, and storage migration tooling.
  • Added password and API-key access, timing-safe credential checks, upload validation, rate limiting, and HMAC-SHA256 signed webhooks.
  • Documented browser, API, AI-client, cloud-storage, ChatGPT Action, MCP, and Render deployment workflows without publishing secrets or user data.
  • Built durable coordination with deduplicated jobs, atomic claims, renewable leases, bounded retries and structured completion records.

Independent product · Dec 2025—Jan 2026

Lume

A full-stack meeting intelligence platform for capturing, storing, searching, and querying meetings and uploaded project files with reusable context.

React · Node.js · MongoDB · AWS S3 · WebSockets · RAG
Architecture & product details
  • Built a RAG question-answering flow with vector embeddings, intent routing, evidence extraction, and multi-pass generator/critic refinement.
  • Modeled reusable Project Brain knowledge bases that learn project-specific language and relationships from transcripts, files, and seeded context.
  • Designed transcript-aware search and citation-backed answers so useful outputs remain traceable to meetings and source documents.

Public repository · Personal fitness intelligence · 2026

Forge

A personal fitness-intelligence backend that unifies strength training, nutrition, sleep, heart-rate, and recovery data into program-aware analysis.

Python · FastAPI · MongoDB Atlas · Webhooks · Scheduled sync · Render
Data pipeline & analysis details
  • Implemented configurable Hevy/Oura API pulls with a 15-minute default, separate Health Auto Export pushes documented at six hours, on-demand refresh and CSV ingestion.
  • Modeled workouts, nutrition, sleep, heart-rate, recovery, and body metrics in MongoDB for daily and weekly analysis.
  • Built an analysis engine that compares actual performance with a 12-week hypertrophy plan and scores workout adherence, nutrition compliance, and recovery quality.
  • Preferred Oura recovery fields while filling missing values from Apple Health, keeping overlapping sources distinct.

Founder & Lead Developer · Jun 2023—Sep 2025

Tallyrus

Educator-facing essay feedback combining teacher rubrics, historical examples and retrieval-grounded AI outputs for review.

Python / Flask · LangChain · FAISS / NumPy · Transformers / PyTorch · LangSmith · React
Grading, pretrained inference & product iteration
  • Built a Flask grading API using LangChain/OpenAI embeddings, normalized NumPy vectors and FAISS similarity search to retrieve historical essay context.
  • Combined retrieved examples, the essay, teacher rubric and prompt in GPT-4o requests returning reviewable feedback.
  • Integrated a pretrained Hugging Face Transformers classifier with PyTorch, sentence chunking and length-weighted prediction aggregation.
  • Integrated LangSmith tracing into the Tallyrus AI workflow.
  • Connected Express/Multer uploads to AWS S3 and MongoDB records and React educator interfaces.
  • Led product planning, educator feedback, user testing and iteration; raised five figures for product development.

Collaborative founder product. Pretrained inference and tracing integration; no custom-training or classifier-accuracy claim.

Public repository · Figma-originated UI prototype

3D Commerce Experience

An interactive varsity-jacket storefront with product discovery, cart, checkout, account, search, content pages, and a responsive Three.js configurator.

React · TypeScript · Three.js · Vite · Tailwind · Radix UI
3D interaction & interface details
  • Built product discovery, cart, checkout, account, search, and content pages as reusable responsive flows.
  • Developed a Three.js product builder using GLB assets and Draco decoding.
  • Implemented independent garment customization, color configuration, placement adjustments, modals, product cards, navigation, and consent flows.
  • Preloaded poster, GLB and DRACO assets, withheld the canvas until visible pixels rendered and restored a retryable poster after interrupted WebGL rendering.
  • Refined garment-attached artwork, sleeve masking, Safari alignment and responsive builder height.

Interface concept originated in Figma; implementation and repository evidence are linked.

Public repository · Figma-originated UI prototype

Enterprise Healthcare Dashboard

A reusable dashboard prototype for healthcare account hierarchies, trial progress, follow-ups, barriers, site progression, tasks, and detail workflows.

React · TypeScript · Vue · Vite · Tailwind · UI systems
Workflow & component details
  • Designed account hierarchy, progress metrics, ongoing trial, pending follow-up, AI-barrier, and site-progression views.
  • Built reusable metric cards, progress steppers, task queues, barrier summaries, trial-detail modals, and editing patterns.
  • Implemented the design in both React/TypeScript and Vue to validate reusable component structure.

Synthetic Figma-originated prototype; no employer/client data or screenshots are published.

Public repository · 30+ document corpus

Azure RAG Document Search

A document-search proof of concept with multi-format loading, chunking, Azure OpenAI embeddings, FAISS retrieval, source citation, and interactive Q&A.

Python · Azure OpenAI · LangChain · FAISS · Embeddings · PDF ingestion
Retrieval pipeline details
  • Loaded PDF, TXT, and Markdown sources, then chunked text for embedding and retrieval.
  • Built a FAISS similarity index with Azure OpenAI embeddings and interactive Q&A.
  • Returned source citations and documented configuration for separate Azure embedding and chat-model deployments.

ZS-associated implementation · Oct—Dec 2025

Nova Sonic Voice & Data Assistant

A real-time voice assistant integrating AWS Nova Sonic and Bedrock with WebSocket sessions, Vue interfaces, call analysis, cloud data tools, and mobile-browser recovery.

Node.js · Vue · WebSockets · AWS Bedrock · S3 · Glue
Voice session & data workflow details
  • Built WebSocket session management and browser/iPad interfaces for AWS Nova Sonic and Bedrock voice interaction.
  • Created audio visualization, transcript, tool-log, call-history, database-status, and structured JSON inspection views.
  • Integrated call-recording analysis, prompt and session management, S3 upload, AWS Glue refresh, cloud adapters, deployment, and mobile-browser recovery documentation.
  • Persisted Bedrock invocation history and recovered conversation state after reconnects and EKS pod restarts.

Generalized professional implementation. The historical Render service is suspended; current live operation is not claimed.

HackDavis 2024 · Co-built with Gautham Pandian

AbleGrade

Co-built AI writing-support application for ESL learners with detailed feedback, progress tracking and PDF ingestion.

MongoDB · Express · React · Node.js · OpenAI
Implementation & context
  • Co-built ESL writing feedback using the MERN stack and OpenAI GPT-4.
  • Added PDF upload and parsing, detailed feedback and progress tracking.

Collaborative research prototype · Sep 2023—Mar 2024

Echo

Collaborative identity-verification research prototype combining web interfaces, image handling and blockchain-backed verification.

React · Node.js · Express · Flask · MongoDB · AWS S3 · ResilientDB integration
Implementation & context
  • Collaborated on web interfaces, image handling and blockchain-backed verification.
  • Integrated React, Express, Flask, MongoDB and AWS S3 workflows with ResilientDB.
  • Team award: first place, Interactive Media Track at HackMIT 2023.

Independent macOS utility · Aug 2026

Agent Curtain

macOS privacy utility using the operating system authentication boundary and a restricted local control interface.

Python · macOS APIs · Unix sockets
Implementation & context
  • Covered connected displays and handed authentication to the real macOS Lock Screen.
  • Restricted Unix-socket commands with input filtering, process identity checks and fail-closed behavior.

UC Davis coursework

Systems Programming Projects

Coursework implementations of a Unix-style shell, user-level threading and a FAT-style file system.

C · Unix process APIs · Semaphores · Virtual disks
Implementation & context
  • Implemented a Unix-style shell with process handling.
  • Built user-level threading with context switching, preemption and semaphores.
  • Implemented FAT-style virtual-disk persistence, allocation and boundary/error handling.

Take-home project

Six Degrees Application

Full-stack graph relationship explorer with a C++ backend and interactive frontend.

C++ · Crow · React · TypeScript
Implementation & context
  • Built a C++ Crow backend with API routes and a React/TypeScript interface.
  • Added graph-style relationship exploration, error handling, logging and setup documentation.

Private implementation · Nov 2025

Smart-glasses Audio Visualizer

Customized wearable interface for audio visualization and live transcription.

TypeScript · React · MentraOS SDK
Implementation & context
  • Customized a TypeScript/React interface for audio visualization and live transcription with the MentraOS SDK.
  • Implemented audio-chunk handling, transcription modules and troubleshooting flows.

Custom application built with MentraOS; private source. No ownership of the underlying platform is implied.

Earlier work

Systems, coursework, and experiments.

Experience

Built in good company.

Building at the intersection of technology, operations, and user needs.

Jun 2024—Present
ZS logo

ZS Associates

Business Technology Solutions Associate

Cross-functional scope across AI/RAG services, Snowflake and MDM, API integrations, CRM validation, and delivery documentation.

  • Built enterprise AI/RAG assistants and backend services with React, FastAPI, AWS data services, Redis, and document-ingestion workflows.
  • Developed Snowflake SQL pipelines for master-data extraction, identifier matching, reconciliation, and quality reporting across 327K+ records.
More scope & impact
  • Designed entity-matching and license-reconciliation frameworks across 67K+ records using healthcare identifiers and fuzzy-search signals for stewardship review.
  • Defined layered ETL/MDM flows with landing, staging, transformation, canonical, and publication layers, including delta logic, history, and data-quality controls.
  • Built secure browser-to-backend workflows for targeted entity lookup and asynchronous CSV/XLSX enrichment while keeping credentials server-side and write operations explicitly gated.
  • Implemented and validated React/Vite business workflows for hierarchical records, approval states, read-only gating, linked actions, and executive summaries.
  • Translated ambiguous stakeholder requirements into testable rules, API integrations, source-to-target mappings, UAT scenarios, decision logs, executive decks, and delivery documentation.
  • Built Python and Flask endpoints plus AWS S3 and Smartsheet API integrations for automated document-management workflows.
  • Contributed to RAG evaluation and model workflows using FastAPI, Uvicorn, pytest, and enterprise AI tooling.
PythonFastAPISnowflakeAWSETL / MDMCRM / UATApplied AI
Jun 2023 — Sep 2025
Tallyrus logo

Tallyrus

Founder & Lead Developer

  • Built a Flask grading API with LangChain/OpenAI embeddings, NumPy normalization and FAISS retrieval, combining historical examples with educator rubrics and prompts.
  • Integrated pretrained Transformers/PyTorch inference and LangSmith tracing alongside React grading workflows, MongoDB and S3 services.
More product & founder details
  • Built role-aware classroom, assignment, submission, and rubric workflows with student/teacher authorization before changing academic records or files.
  • Implemented React/TypeScript and Express workflows with Google OAuth, protected routes, secure sessions, CORS, rate limiting, and security headers.
  • Added S3-backed upload, replacement, and document-parsing workflows for PDFs, DOCX files, rubrics, and prior graded essays.
  • Led product planning, user testing, iterative development, and fundraising, raising five figures for product development.
RAGLangChainFAISS / NumPyLangSmithTransformers / PyTorchFlaskMongoDBOAuthS3
Visit Tallyrus ↗
Mar 2023 — Jun 2025
Tech4Good Lab logo

Tech4Good Lab

Data Analyst / Web Development Lead

  • Built collaborative TypeScript/Figma chat, polling, response and spreadsheet-export workflows as part of the Tech4Good research team.
  • Built and iterated chat, text-entry, polling, carousel, radar, Likert, tooltip, and Excel/XLSX modules; the team library included six public Community resources.
More scope, evidence & links
  • Implemented threaded and synchronized chat, edits, anonymous responses, bulk loading, voting, multi-select polls, vote changes, grouped widgets, and configurable admin controls.
  • Analyzed 43,340 anonymized interaction rows across 2,805 sessions with Python/Pandas; built Power BI and Tableau research dashboards.
  • Contributed a responsive Angular top-paying-industries component for Tech4Good’s career-exploration product.
Figma APITypeScriptNode.jsExpressMongoDBExcel/XLSXPython/PandasAngular
Sep 2023 — Mar 2024
UC Davis logo

Echo · UC Davis

Software Engineer & Research Collaborator

  • Collaborated with Professor Mohammad Sadoghi’s research group on digital identity authentication and secure-media workflows.
  • Integrated facial-detection APIs, AWS S3/Multer storage, MongoDB, Express, Flask, and Python SDK services.
More engineering details
  • Built React and Node interfaces around capture, matching, proof creation, and verification states.
  • Connected the end-to-end workflow to ResilientDB for identity-proof creation and persistence.
ReactFlaskAWS S3ResilientDB

About

Curious by default.
Practical by design.

I’m a UC Davis computer science graduate based in San Francisco, California. I like untangling hard technical problems, but I care just as much about whether the result feels intuitive and earns its place in someone’s workflow.

My work spans product engineering, grounded AI applications, secure backend integrations, and data systems. The common thread is simple: make complex technology useful, testable, and clear.

University of California, DavisB.S. Computer Science
GraduatedJune 2025 · GPA 3.7
CredentialsAWS Cloud Practitioner · Google Data Analytics
LeadershipTau Beta Pi Treasurer · Dean’s Honor

Core capabilities

01

Product engineering

React, Next.js, TypeScript, Node.js, responsive interfaces, end-to-end product delivery

02

Applied AI

RAG, FAISS, LangChain, LangSmith tracing, Transformers/PyTorch inference, OpenAI, AWS Bedrock

03

Backend & data

Python, FastAPI, Flask, SQL, MongoDB, Snowflake, Cloudflare D1, Pandas, Power BI, Tableau

04

Integration & quality

REST APIs, OpenAPI, MCP, webhooks, authentication, Playwright, Vitest, pytest

05

Automation & delivery

Human-in-the-loop workflows, audit trails, ATS and PDF quality gates, UAT, decision logs, and exact-document validation

Publications

ICER
2024

Evaluating Exploratory Reading Groups for Supporting Undergraduate Research Pipelines in Computing

ICER 2024 · Published August 12, 2024

Co-author · David M. Torres-Mendoza, Saba Kheirinejad, Mustafa Ajmal, Ashwin Chembu, Dustin Palea, Jim Whitehead, and David T. Lee

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SIGCSE TS
2027

Improving Curriculum Through Collaboration: Exploring A Participatory Approach to Course Design

ACM SIGCSE TS 2027 · Accepted / upcoming

Co-author · David M. Torres-Mendoza, Mustafa Ajmal, Peter Yang, Tiauna K. Vasquez, Alexander Sherbrooke, Ashwin Chembu, Ian Phan, Matthew D. Nguyen, and David Lee

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Awards & coverage

Built together. Recognized together.

Team awards and university coverage, alongside the research publications above.

Tallyrus · Team award

First place, student division — 2024 Startup Challenge Monterey Bay

UC Davis coverage ↗

Get in touch

Have a hard problem
worth solving?

ashchembu@gmail.com ↗

Project screenshot

Captured from the actual project interface.

Open full image ↗