AI-powered co-founder assistant that turns a startup idea into a roadmap, funding strategy, and market plan
Next.jsFastAPIPythonTypeScriptSupabase
Ashwin Shanmugam
Software Engineer · San Francisco, CA, USA
Featured projects
LLM-based product roadmap assistant that ranks features against business goals
NestJSNext.jsMastra.aiLangChainMCPRender
Experience
Designed and shipped an AI-powered Market Map platform end-to-end
Won $20,000 in seed funding and shipped vocal-disorder detection to 500+ beta users
Built 65+ REST APIs and shipped 75+ user stories for a full-stack enterprise app
Led TDD during a pilot phase with 100% test coverage, cutting backlog bugs by 40%
Writing
One-sentence summary of the post for the index page.
About
I'm a software engineer in San Francisco, currently an AI Software Engineer Intern at Headline, where I designed and shipped an AI-powered Market Map platform end-to-end and architected a production-grade AI memory layer on Neon Postgres with pgvector. Before that I was the Founding AI Engineer at VOCA Health, where we placed 5th overall at the Cozad New Venture Challenge 2025 and secured $20,000 in seed funding for an iOS app detecting vocal disorders for 500+ beta users. I started my career at Deloitte, building 65+ REST APIs and full-stack features in .NET across two years as a Software Engineer. I'm finishing my MS in Information Management (Computer Science) at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign in May 2026.
- Ship end-to-end — I'd rather own a product from design to deployment than a slice of it, like the Market Map platform at Headline. - Engineer past the happy path — multi-agent systems fail in messy ways, so I architect for the failure cases, not just the demo. - Measure the impact — 89% diagnostic accuracy, 72%→91% prioritization accuracy, 50 ms shaved off API response times. If it isn't measured, it didn't improve.
I graduate from UIUC in May 2026 and I'm looking for full-time software / AI engineering roles, ideally at startups where I can build agentic systems and production AI products end-to-end.