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ashwin shanmugam

Engineer, product builder, systems thinker.

Background

I'm an AI Software Engineer in San Francisco, currently building production AI products and internal agent infrastructure at Headline. My recent work includes launching a deck publishing platform, shipping an eight-provider email-finder waterfall that raised outreach match rates to 95%, and completing a zero-downtime Elasticsearch reindex. I previously interned at Headline, where I built a conversational market map with eight Mastra agents and a sandboxed file I/O layer for AI agents.

Before Headline, I was the Founding AI Engineer at VOCA Health, where we placed 5th overall and 2nd in the Health category at the Cozad New Venture Challenge 2025, securing $20,000 in seed funding for an iOS app that detects vocal disorders for 500+ beta users with 89% diagnostic accuracy. I began my career at Deloitte, building 65+ REST APIs and full-stack features in .NET.

Education

  • Master of Science in Information Management (Computer Science), University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign — May 2026, GPA: 3.7/4.0. Coursework: Database Administration & Scaling, Operating Systems, Natural Language Processing, Generative AI.
  • Bachelor of Engineering in Electronics and Communication Engineering, Sri Sivasubramaniya Nadar College of Engineering, Anna University — May 2022, GPA: 8.526/10.0. Coursework: OOP, Data Structures & Algorithms, Computer Architecture, AI/ML, Web Development.

Skills

  • Languages: C, C++, C#, Go, Java, JavaScript, Python, Rust, TypeScript
  • Web development: HTML, CSS, .NET Core, AngularJS, React, Node.js, NestJS, Next.js
  • Cloud: AWS, Azure, Docker, GitLab, Firebase, Kubernetes, Render
  • Databases: Microsoft SQL Server, MySQL Workbench, PostgreSQL, Neon, MongoDB
  • Machine learning: TensorFlow, PyTorch, NLP, Keras, scikit-learn, PySpark, OpenCV, NumPy, Pandas
  • AI development: Claude Code, Cursor, Codex, Grok Bot, Devin, MCP

How I work

  • Ship end-to-end — I like owning products from ingest and storage through hosting, export, and the final user workflow.
  • Engineer past the happy path — zero-downtime reindexing, backfill recovery, and isolated agent sandboxes matter as much as the demo.
  • Measure the impact — 95% outreach match rate, 89% diagnostic accuracy, and 50 ms shaved off API response times.