Asish Nelapati
@asishnelapati
I build AI-powered products, scalable backend systems, and user-facing experiences from zero to production.
United StatesWhat I'm looking for
I've built Ka'ana AI from scratch into a consumer AI food-discovery app serving 10,000+ users and 5,000+ restaurants. I now lead a six-person engineering, design, and content team, owning technical decisions and improving Ana's reasoning, conversational tone, and menu-level accuracy across the Hawaiian Islands.
Previously, I scaled systems for MediBuddy's 30M+ users, cutting GraphQL migration latency by 60% and increasing delivery rates by 30%. I've also built AI sales automation at Bamboo Rose, published LLM coding-capability research at Penn State, and scaled Blue Yonder's backend capacity from 5,000 to 15,000 concurrent users with zero downtime.
Experience
Work history, roles, and key accomplishments
Team Lead
Ka'ana AI
Mar 2026 - Present (5 months)
Promoted to lead a team of 6 across engineering, design, and content, owning tech decisions and code review while upgrading Ana's reasoning and conversational tone, raising menu-level accuracy, and expanding to all Hawaiian Islands.
Founding Engineer
Ka'ana AI
Jun 2025 - Mar 2026 (9 months)
Built Ka'ana from scratch as an AI food-discovery app, reaching over 10,000 users in under a year while aggregating data for more than 5,000 restaurants via web scraping and partner APIs. Architected and deployed the backend server's auth, REST APIs on EC2, Postgres, Redis caching, Docker, CI/CD, and PostHog; served 3x the projected load without downtime. Engineered semantic search with pgvector e
Published a study researching trade-offs in 6 LLMs' coding capabilities by designing a model evaluation system. Created a portal mapping assignments to keyword graphs using an NLP model, saving professors 50% in grading time and providing ML-driven feedback for students.
AI Engineer Internship
Bamboo Rose
May 2024 - Aug 2024 (3 months)
Developed an AI-BDR pipeline using LangGraph and CrewAI over a Pinecone and Supabase vector store that researches each target and drafts emails and AI pitch videos, automating a 45-minute manual task to under 5 minutes per lead.
Shipped live delivery tracking and Google Maps pinning for one of India's largest healthcare platforms (30M+ users). Developed an automated driver route-scheduling system, increasing delivery rate by 30%. Migrated legacy REST endpoints to GraphQL for 30M+ users, cutting latency by 60%.
Split the monolith into separate app, database, and Redis-worker tiers behind load balancers with auto-scaling groups, raising capacity from 5,000 to 15,000 concurrent users with zero downtime at peak.
Education
Degrees, certifications, and relevant coursework
Pennsylvania State University
Master of Science, Computer Engineering
Grade: 3.9/4.0
Pursued a Master of Science in Computer Engineering with a GPA of 3.9/4.0.
Birla Institute of Technology and Science, Pilani
Dual Degree (M.Sc. and B.E.), Mathematics and Mechanical Engineering
Completed a dual degree program with a Master of Science in Mathematics and a Bachelor of Engineering in Mechanical Engineering.
Availability
Location
United StatesAuthorized to work in
Job categories
Skills
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