Shantnu Bhalla

Hi, I'm Shantnu

I build scalable backend systems and distributed architectures, craft full-stack, AI-powered applications, and turn complex problems into reliable, production-ready software.

3 Years Exp
4.0 GPA
USA
Available Now

Open to Opportunities

Actively seeking full-time Software Engineering roles. Let's discuss how I can contribute to your team.

Get in Touch

About Me

Currently pursuing my Master's in Computer Science at Virginia Tech with a perfect 4.0 GPA. For me, tech has always been about diving deep into complex challenges and building intelligent solutions that truly matter. I'm constantly motivated to learn, build, and refine, whether it's debugging production issues or streamlining developer workflows. I find energy in the details that make systems more robust and efficient.

Bringing nearly 3 years of professional experience spanning Backend, Full-stack, AI Engineering, and Distributed Systems, I enjoy working end-to-end, whether designing architectures or integrating intelligent features. I've contributed to product cycles at every stage: taking something from 0→1, scaling it 1→N, modernizing legacy flows, or rapidly iterating on new ideas.

Backend Engineering

Designing reliable, high-performance backend services

Distributed Systems

Building scalable, fault-tolerant systems at scale

AI Engineering & ML

Applied ML systems from research to production

Full Stack & DevOps

End-to-end product delivery and deployment

~/shantnu
$status--services
3/3 services runningall systems operational

Work Experience

My professional journey in software engineering

Current Role

Research Assistant - NLP/ML Labs

Virginia Tech
Alexandria, VA
Sep 2025 – Present

Technologies

PythonAWS S3AWS EMRPySparkUniversal Sentence EncoderLLMsData Pipelines

Highlights

  • Built a scalable misuse detection system processing 17M+ app-store reviews to identify privacy and consent concerns.
  • Operationalized an embedding + regression pipeline (USE) to generate review-level risk scores and app-level aggregation for prioritization.
  • Built distributed data processing workflows on AWS (S3/EMR/PySpark) for large-scale review ingestion and feature extraction, enabling repeatable experimentation and faster iteration cycles.
  • Implemented few-shot LLM narrator labeling and moral analysis to convert flagged reviews into explainable, product-facing signals.

Projects

Research and engineering projects I've built

Featured Projects

Featured Project

ZeroSignal | Offline-First On-Device RAG AI Assistant

KotlinJetpack ComposeNexaSDKLlama 3.2 3B+6

Built an offline-first Android AI assistant that runs Llama 3.2 3B entirely on-device using NexaSDK with Qualcomm Snapdragon NPU acceleration and automatic CPU/GPU fallback for non-Elite devices.

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Featured Project

OpenGPU | Distributed GPU Marketplace & Execution Platform

Next.jsReactTypeScriptNode.js+9

Built a production-grade GPU rental platform enabling consumers to run workloads on remote GPUs with end-to-end trust, isolation, and payment guarantees.

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Featured Project

AI Powered Kiosk Restaurant Platform | Full-Stack Application

JavaReactTypeScriptJavaScript+7

Architected a kiosk and mobile application using React and TypeScript, enabling touch and voice-based interactions.

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Open Source Contributions

Merged

BetterDB Monitor

BetterDB-inc/monitor · 113 stars · Backed by Open Core Ventures

PR #23: fix: pre-calculate cluster node positions and reduce drag disturbance

Fixed two bugs in the Cluster Topology Graph's D3 force-directed visualization — nodes overlapping on initial render due to missing pre-calculated positions, and dragging any node disturbing all others from an overheated simulation. Pre-calculated role-based initial positions, tuned alphaDecay/alphaTarget parameters, and fixed broken simulation detection logic.

React 18D3.jsTypeScriptNestJSVite

Currently Building

Coming Soon

OutreachCopilot | AI-Powered LinkedIn Outreach Engine

Next.jsReactTypeScriptPython+6

Building a local-first AI application that generates personalized LinkedIn messages and InMails using structured inputs like resumes, job descriptions, and recipient profiles.

Coming Soon

AI-Powered DB | Intelligent Database Optimization Engine

PythonPostgreSQLLLMsSQL

Building an AI-powered database optimization tool that goes beyond NLP-to-SQL generation — targeting schema analysis, index recommendations, and query-level structural improvements for real-world database performance.

More Projects

ReceiptSplit | AI-Powered Receipt Parsing & Expense Splitting

Next.jsTypeScriptPostgreSQL+7

Built a full-stack AI-powered receipt parsing and expense splitting application that uses GPT-4o Vision for structured extraction from receipt photos, with confidence scoring and a human-in-the-loop review and correction workflow.

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ACDS | Modern Website Rebuild for Courier Business

Next.jsReactTypeScript+4

Rebuilt an outdated PHP website (~10-12 years old) for a small courier and delivery business in Alexandria, VA, migrating the entire UI to a modern tech stack with a luxury dark-themed design.

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Mind-Loop | Latent-Space Recurrence for Efficient Reasoning

PyTorchPythonHugging Face+1

Re-implemented a 28M parameter recurrent language model from scratch, presenting a lighter alternative for step by step reasoning by reusing a compact transformer block.

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Cortex Network Telemetry Engine | High-Performance Systems

C++20CMakelibpcap+3

Engineered a C++ network monitoring system capable of processing 1-5 Gbps packet streams with sub-millisecond p99 latency and <0.1% packet loss through efficient buffer management.

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Quantifying Emotional Slant for Tweets Based on Responses

PythonPyTorchHugging Face (DistilRoBERTa+3

Developed a robust data pipeline to curate "NewsSlant," a corpus of 34,790 English tweets from 48 U.S. news outlets and 4M associated replies, with a strict chronological cap of the first 20 replies per thread (345,182 labeled replies) to mitigate viral outlier bias and manage computational cost.

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NYC 311 Service Request Analysis

PythonPandasNumPy+5

Built an analytics pipeline for 185K+ NYC 311 requests with thorough data cleaning, outlier removal, and feature engineering.

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Online Bookstore E-commerce Application

ReactTypeScriptJava+1

Developed a full-stack e-commerce bookstore application, serving 40+ book titles across 4 categories, highlighting comprehensive web development skills.

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Salary Prediction Tool

PythonSeleniumPandas+2

Developed a predictive tool to estimate job salaries, scraping over 900 job listings from Glassdoor using Python and Selenium.

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Customer Retention Analysis for Telecommunication Company

PythonPandasNumPy+4

Executed comprehensive data analysis and visualization on a dataset of nearly 8,000 customer entries, employing various classification techniques and comparing their effectiveness using ROC-AUC metrics.

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Skills & Technologies

Technologies I work with

Languages

JavaGoPythonC/C++JavaScriptTypeScriptHTMLCSSSQL

Tools & Frameworks

Spring BootKafkaAWSDockerFastAPINest.jsNode.jsExpress.jsJenkinsSonarQubeBitbucketGit/GitHub/GitlabJiraConfluence

Databases

Relational SQL (MySQL & PostgreSQL)NoSQL (MongoDB)RedisElasticsearch

AI & ML Systems

RAG PipelinesVector EmbeddingsLLM IntegrationPrompt EngineeringTransformer ArchitecturesNLP & Text ClassificationHugging FacePyTorch

Expertise

Backend/Full Stack DevelopmentDistributed SystemsObject Oriented ProgrammingDatabase ManagementOperating SystemsSystem DesignData Structures and Algorithms

Education & Achievements

Academic background and recognition

Academic Journey

Masters in Computer Science and Applications

Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University

Alexandria, VA, USA
Aug 2024 - May 2026 (Expected)
GPA: 4.0/4.0

Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science

Indian Institute of Information Technology Guwahati

Guwahati, India
Jul 2018 - May 2022

Awards & Recognition

GreenHack 2021, Prague

Secured 1st place in the CSOB Track among 50+ teams.

Unihack 2021, Czech Republic

Awarded the Special Jury Award for innovative solutions.

Health-Hacks Hackathon, California, USA

Achieved 2nd Runner-Up position.

Skoda COVID Mobility Race 2020, Czech Republic

Earned the Kraj Vysocina Prize, competing against 20+ teams.

21-Day Data Challenge, Lighthouse Labs, Canada

Completed an intensive data challenge program.

Get In Touch

Let's discuss opportunities and ideas

Actively seeking full-time opportunities
USA
Available immediately