Projects
A few things I've built that I'm proud of.
Education
Where I studied.
Vanderbilt University
M.S. & Ph.D. in Computer Science — Artificial Intelligence & machine learning
August 2025 — Present
•
Nashville, Tennessee, USA
GPA: 4.0/4.0Graduate Research AssistantMachine Learning, Artificial Intelligence
Key Courses
Machine Learning
Advanced Machine Learning
Deep Learning
Representation Learning
Artificial Intelligence
AI Systems
Big Data
Quantum Computing
Numerical Analysis
Texas Tech University
Bachelor of Science in Computer Science, Minor in Mathematics
Jan 2019 — May 2023
•
Lubbock, Texas, USA
GPA: 3.9/4.0
Key Courses
Data Structures & Algorithms
Computational Thinking
Object-Oriented Programming
Concepts of Programming Languages
Database Management Systems
Operating Systems
Computer Networks
Computer Architecture
Computer Organization
Software Engineering
Theory of Automata
Discrete Mathematics
Mathematics for Engineers and Scientists
Experience
Places I've worked and problems I've solved.
August 2025 — Present
Applied ResearchLLMsInformation RetrievalTeaching
PythonFastAPILLMsSemantic RetrievalAWS
Role Description
- •Built research.team, an LLM-powered grant discovery and team-formation platform, grounded in a mixed-methods HCI study (N=36 interviews, N=306 surveys).
- •Shipped a dense retrieval engine over 80,000+ federal grants and 500 researcher profiles that beat BM25, TF-IDF, and keyword baselines (MRR 0.54 → 0.74; nDCG@5 +47%).
- •Teaching Assistant for Algorithms (CS 3250), supporting 60+ students through weekly office hours, exam review sessions, and grading on core data structures and complexity concepts.
July 2024 — July 2025
Healthcare TechMicroservicesReal-time Data Streaming
AWS GlueApache KafkaMuleSoftSQL Server.NETReactOpenShiftDockerKubernetesJenkins
Role Description
- •Engineered AWS Glue ETL jobs to reconcile 11M+ InContact records with NICE APIs, eliminating call-recording gaps and automatically generating NACHA-compliant audit reports.
- •Designed a Kafka + MuleSoft event-driven streaming pipeline propagating donation events across downstream services, deployed on OpenShift through Jenkins CI/CD and sustaining 99.9% uptime.
- •Enforced data quality with multi-layer validation across .NET APIs and SQL Server data contracts, rejecting malformed donor records at ingest rather than surfacing them in downstream reporting.
- •Replaced a legacy .NET donation system with a React + .NET platform, cutting call-center handling time by 20% and achieving full PCI compliance across all transaction flows.
June 2023 — June 2024
AgTechData CatalogCloud MigrationAPI Development
PythonNode.jsAWS AuroraDynamoDBS3Express.jsPuppeteerGitHub Actions
Role Description
- •Built a unified data catalog consolidating 5,000+ assets (PDFs, videos, decision trees) from Brandfolder, Wistia, and Stonly into AWS Aurora, with nightly sync pipelines, automated metadata extraction, and cross-source taxonomy mapping.
- •Migrated AGCO's monolithic marketplace to a distributed architecture on AWS Aurora, removing shared-database coupling and enabling independent per-service deployments.
- •Automated nightly 900-page reporting via a Puppeteer + S3 batch pipeline, eliminating manual report generation and saving hours of analyst time per week across Precision Planting sites.
- •Delivered 15 production REST APIs on Aurora Serverless with standardized data contracts and JWT auth, consolidating data access for downstream consuming services.
June 2022 — May 2023
Construction TechAPI DevelopmentCI/CD PipelinesDeveloper Tools
.NETReactAzurePostgreSQLDockerAzure DevOps
Role Description
- •Launched a unified API developer portal spanning all HCSS products, scaling to 2M+ weekly interactions with sub-second response times.
- •Automated API publishing and validation for 10 engineering teams by shipping a custom Azure Marketplace pipeline extension, cutting per-release manual overhead 3x.
- •Reduced API release lead time from 2 days to 6 hours by designing multi-stage CI/CD pipelines across QA, staging, and production environments in Azure DevOps.
May 2021 — August 2021
Research CommercializationFull Stack DevelopmentCustomer DiscoveryUI/UX Design
ReactSpring BootMySQLAWSOAuth2
Role Description
- •Designed normalized MySQL schemas and ETL pipelines on AWS to power real-time analytics, surfacing product KPIs that directly informed prioritization decisions.
- •Delivered full-stack features with React, Spring Boot, and OAuth2 on AWS, and conducted 20+ customer discovery interviews to define MVP scope.
January 2021 — January 2022
Research Assistant
Mobility Automation Lab, Texas Tech University
Lubbock, Texas
RoboticsComputer VisionSLAMAutonomous Systems
PythonROSOpenCVAWSEC2S3NVIDIA Jetson
Role Description
- •Built an edge-to-cloud streaming pipeline on AWS EC2/S3 ingesting real-time NVIDIA Jetson sensor streams, enabling live position tracking and proactive fault detection via WebSocket dashboards.
- •Implemented RGB-D SLAM using ROS and probabilistic sensor fusion, improving real-time mapping accuracy for autonomous robots in dynamic environments.
Skills
What I work with day to day.
5Domains66Tools26Expert-level
Expert(3)
PyTorchHugging Facescikit-learn
Proficient(11)
RAGLLMsGenerative AILangGraphMLflowFeature EngineeringModel DeploymentTransformersNLPExperiment TrackingComputer Vision
ExpertProficientFamiliar
Certifications
Credentials I've picked up along the way.
AWS Certified Machine Learning Engineer – Associate
Amazon Web Services · June 2026
Applied Machine LearningMLOpsModel DeploymentDeep LearningNatural Language Processing
AWS Certified Data Engineer – Associate
Amazon Web Services · May 2026
Data EngineeringData PipelinesCloud ComputingData Storage TechnologiesData Management+2
AWS Certified Solutions Architect – Associate
Amazon Web Services · December 2024
Cloud ArchitectureCloud DataCloud SecurityCloud Infrastructure
AWS Certified Developer – Associate
Amazon Web Services · January 2025
AWSCloud DevelopmentContainerizationCode DeploymentServerless Applications
HashiCorp Certified: Terraform Associate
HashiCorp · June 2025
TerraformInfrastructure as CodeCloud ProvisioningResource ManagementState Management
AWS Certified Cloud Practitioner
Amazon Web Services · November 2023
AWS FundamentalsCloud ConceptsCloud SecurityCloud ServicesCloud Platforms
AWS Certified AI Practitioner
Amazon Web Services · June 2026
Foundational ModelGenerative AIMachine LearningArtificial Intelligence
About Me
The short version.
I'm a CS PhD student at Vanderbilt, working within the SOL Lab. My interests sit at the intersection of deep learning, machine learning, and AI systems: not just whether a model works, but what it takes to serve and scale it.
Most of my time goes to research.team, where I build retrieval over federal grant data and then sit down with researchers to find out where the rankings get it wrong. Before the PhD I spent three years as a software engineer at St. Jude, AGCO, and HCSS, mostly on data pipelines and event-driven services.
Outside of that I play tennis and pick up a side project whenever a paper looks worth reimplementing myself.
Get In Touch
Have something in mind? Let's talk.
bibek.dhungana@vanderbilt.eduNashville, Tennessee