Founding Engineer · AI Systems × Full-Stack

ASISH NELAPATI

Building AI agents that ship.

I take products from zero to production, and obsess over the milliseconds in between.

View selected work Get in touch
Currently: Team Lead @ Kaana · Seattle, WA Scroll
01

Selected Work

KAANA

Founding Engineer → Team Lead · Jun 2025 - Present

Meet Ana, an AI dining agent for Hawai'i. Ask anything, from tonight's happy hours to what's actually in the dish, and explore the islands on a map that thinks local. Live on iOS & Android.

Kaana Explore: Hawai'i map with rated local restaurants
Kaana Collections: saved spots and shared lists

I built Ka'ana from scratch: auth, REST APIs on EC2, Postgres design and indexing, Redis caching, Docker, CI/CD, and PostHog observability, over data aggregated from 5,000+ restaurants via scraping and partner APIs. Launch traffic arrived at three times the projected load; the platform served it without downtime. Nine months in, I was promoted to lead the team of six.

Ana's search is semantic: pgvector embeddings with a LangChain + Gemini agent that tool-calls SQL filters, re-ranked against a per-user preference vector that updates after every conversation. Video is auto-tagged with AWS Rekognition and starts in under a second over HLS + CloudFront, down from 2 to 3 seconds.

App Store kaana.app
10K+ Users in year one
5K+ Restaurants indexed
3× Projected load, zero downtime
<1s Video time-to-first-frame
Decide where to eat now: Ana picks the one place worth it Explore Hawai'i's map and eat where the island actually eats Collect your favorite finds and share them with your crew
On the App Store · Food & Drink
ai-bdr.app
AI-BDR platform dashboard
01

AI-BDR Platform

Bamboo Rose · AI Engineer Intern

An agentic outreach pipeline: LangGraph + CrewAI agents over a Pinecone + Supabase vector store research each target and draft personalized emails and AI pitch videos, turning a 45-minute manual task into under 5 minutes per lead.

  • LangGraph
  • CrewAI
  • Pinecone
  • Supabase
  • Flask
  • React
ai-stock-advisor.app
AI Stock Advisor stock details page
02

AI Stock Advisor

Graduate Capstone

A financial copilot that fine-tunes Llama on SEC filings and news, then grounds every answer with RAG and live market data. Containerized and deployed on Azure.

  • Llama
  • RAG
  • LangChain
  • NVIDIA NIM
  • React
  • Docker
GitHub
MediBuddy home screen
MediBuddy services screen
MediBuddy health screen
03

Real-Time Delivery Tracking

MediBuddy · Software Development Engineer

Live delivery tracking and Google Maps pinning for one of India's largest healthcare platforms (30M+ users). An automated driver route-scheduling system, iterated on driver feedback, lifted delivery rate by 30%. Migrating legacy REST endpoints to GraphQL cut latency by 60%.

  • Java
  • Kotlin
  • GraphQL
  • Apollo
  • Google Maps
  • Firebase
repcrec · zsh
$ ./repcrec --sites 10 --tx batch_07
[T3] begin → R(x4)@site2 … OK (MVCC snapshot v12)
[site5] failure detected, reads rerouted to available copies
[T3] W(x8) → commit ✓ serializable · zero locks held
[site5] recovered → catch-up sync complete
04

Replicated Concurrency Control

Penn State · Distributed Systems

A distributed database engine in C++ across ten replicated sites: serializable snapshot isolation via MVCC, available-copies replication, and lock-free commits. Kill a site mid-transaction and reads reroute to live copies, and recovery catches the site back up without breaking serializability.

  • C++
  • MVCC
  • Replication
  • Fault Tolerance
GitHub

Success rate · hard LeetCode problems

Copilot
98%
DeepSeek
96%
GPT
90%
Gemini
68%

6 LLMs · runtime, memory & complexity benchmarks

05

Can LLMs Crack the Code?

Penn State · Published Research

Benchmarked six LLMs on structured LeetCode problems across runtime, memory, and time-space complexity. A published study of where generated code actually holds up.

  • Python
  • NLP
  • LLM Evals
  • Docker
Read the paper
02

About

Asish Nelapati at The Vessel, Hudson Yards, New York
NYC, where the food research never ends

I'm Asish, an engineer who likes owning the whole stack.

Over the last five years I've shipped features to platforms serving 30M+ customers, taken a founding-team AI product from zero to 10,000+ users in its first year, and earned the promotion to lead the team that builds it. The common thread: systems that stay fast, honest, and maintainable under real-world load.

Away from the keyboard I'm usually chasing good food, which, conveniently, is also my day job.

AI & ML

LangGraph · LangChain · CrewAI · RAG · Embeddings · pgvector · Pinecone · Tool-calling · MCP · LLM Evals

Backend & Cloud

Flask · FastAPI · Node.js · GraphQL · AWS · PostgreSQL · MySQL · Redis · Supabase · Docker · Prometheus

Frontend & Mobile

React · React Native · Next.js · Redux · Kotlin · Java · Firebase

Languages

Python · TypeScript · JavaScript · SQL · Java · Kotlin · C++

03

Experience

Jun 2025 - Present

Ka'ana AI

Founding Engineer → Team Lead

Flask · FastAPI · TypeScript · AWS · LangChain · LangGraph · Redis · Docker
May 2024 - Aug 2024

Bamboo Rose

AI Engineer Intern

Flask · LangGraph · CrewAI · Pinecone · Supabase · React
Sep 2023 - May 2025

Penn State University

Graduate Research Assistant

TypeScript · Node.js · Docker · NLP
Jun 2022 - May 2023

MediBuddy

Software Development Engineer

Java · Kotlin · Node.js · GraphQL · Apollo · Firebase · Crashlytics
Jul 2021 - Jun 2022

Blue Yonder

Backend Engineer

Node.js · MySQL · AWS · Microservices
2021

WILP

Frontend Developer

React · Bootstrap · PostgreSQL

5 years and counting.

04

Contact

LET'S BUILD SOMETHING EXCITING.

Open to interesting problems, good coffee, and better food recommendations.

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asish.nelapati@gmail.com