Open to Founding Engineer & Product Engineering Roles

Prashant Rao

Founding Engineer & Software Engineer

Building scalable SaaS, Fintech and AI products.  ·  Bengaluru, Karnataka, India

2+ Years ExperienceFounding EngineerIIT IndoreImmediate JoinerLearning AI

Highlights

  • IIT Indore Graduate (2024)
  • Founding Engineer at Perusal
  • Built ATS platform from scratch
  • Reduced onboarding pipeline from 90s → 10s
  • Built wealth-management flows at BlinkMoney
  • 5★ CodeChef (Rating 2055)
  • Codeforces Specialist

About

Building things that scale

Civil engineering degree, software engineering career — it wasn't really a plan. I started competitive programming at IIT Indore, hit 5-star on CodeChef and Specialist on Codeforces, and by the time I graduated I'd spent more hours in a code editor than AutoCAD.

The past two years have been fintech and HR-tech. At Perusal I joined as one of the first engineers and built most of the product from scratch — candidate search on Elasticsearch, an end-to-end interview scheduling system, recruiter tooling, and a Lambda-based onboarding pipeline I eventually got down from 90s to 10s. At BlinkMoney I owned the wealth product end to end, wiring up lump-sum, SIP, and daily SIP flows through Fintech Primitives APIs and fixing a KYC pipeline that was quietly creating duplicate transactions on every retry.

I enjoy joining early-stage teams where I can own products end-to-end, work directly with founders, and solve difficult engineering problems. My strongest areas are backend systems, search infrastructure, workflow automation, and AI-powered applications.

Experience

Work history

Software Development Engineer I

BlinkMoney

Nov 2025 – Apr 2026

Remote · Mumbai

  • Reworked the KYC sign-up flow by reusing links and tuning database queries, cutting API calls by ~70% and reducing duplicate transactions.
  • Improved the lien-marking service increasing loan-creation success by ~20%.
  • Built and shipped wealth-management features end to end — lump-sum, SIP, and daily SIP — by connecting Fintech Primitive APIs with NestJS and PostgreSQL.

Founding Engineer

Perusal

May 2024 – Oct 2025

Indore, India

  • Optimized the AWS Lambda + EventBridge client-onboarding pipeline, cutting run time from 90s to 10s (~88% faster).
  • Designed and built REST APIs and backend services using NestJS, MySQL, JWT authentication, and role-based access control, including an automated interview scheduling system.
  • Designed candidate search and filtering using Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, enabling full-text search, ranking, and faster resume discovery.
  • Automated job-description creation using AI, reducing manual writing effort by ~90%.
  • Led the frontend (React, Next.js, TypeScript, Tailwind CSS) and shipped a reusable UI component library on NPM.
  • Added unit and integration tests (Jest, React Testing Library) across components and core flows to harden reliability.

LLM Trainer

AccunAI

Feb 2024 – Apr 2024

Jaipur, India

  • Contributed to fine-tuning a globally leading LLM by applying domain expertise in Reinforcement Learning via Human Feedback (RLHF).
  • Enhanced model accuracy and real-world applicability, driving improvements in AI performance and user interaction quality.

Full-Stack Developer

VisioCreate

Sep 2023 – Jan 2024

India

  • Built and shipped UI/UX-driven full-stack web applications for clients at a design and development studio.

Projects

Personal builds

LumenAI

May 2026 – Present

A privacy-first AI assistant that runs language models locally using Ollama on a Next.js, NestJS, and TypeScript stack.

  • Implemented semantic memory using PostgreSQL and pgvector for vector similarity search and retrieval of relevant historical conversations.
  • Built a retrieval and prompt orchestration pipeline that injects relevant memories into LLM context windows for personalized responses.
Next.jsNestJSTypeScriptOllamaPostgreSQLpgvector

CV2Link

2025

AI-powered resume-to-portfolio generator. Upload a resume and get a shareable, styled portfolio page in seconds.

  • Parses resume content using LLMs and maps it to a structured portfolio schema.
  • Generates a unique shareable URL per upload with a live-rendered portfolio page.
Next.jsNestJSTypeScriptPostgreSQL

Skills

Technical toolkit

Backend

NestJSNode.jsPostgreSQLMySQLElasticsearch

Frontend

ReactNext.jsTypeScriptTailwind

Cloud

AWSDockerCI/CD

Education

Academic background

Indian Institute of Technology, Indore

Nov 2020 – May 2024

Bachelor of Technology – Civil Engineering

Indore, India

Central Hindu Boys School

Jul 2018 – Mar 2020

Senior Secondary (PCM)

India

Achievements

Competitive highlights

5-Star Coder at CodeChef

Max Rating 2055

Specialist at Codeforces

Max Rating 1564

AIR 3 – WE CODE CHALLENGE

Organised by Graphic Era Hill University · 2K+ participants

Engineering Taste

What I like building

  • Search systems
  • Backend architecture
  • Payments and idempotency
  • Workflow automation
  • AI-powered products
  • Scalable APIs

Contact

Let's connect

Open to new roles, collaborations, or just a good technical conversation. Feel free to reach out through any of the channels below.