Ishaan Shah
Software Engineer · MEng CS @ Cornell University
About
I grew up with computers as furniture. At six, an old laptop became a portal. Flash games led to Minecraft, and Minecraft to modding: watching a wooden stick become a lightning staff crystallized something that never left. I wanted to build for the long run: software that outlives me and shapes how people work.
Game jams, college clubs, hackathons, and open source taught me to ship under pressure and speak up even as the junior in the room. An AsyncAPI discussion I almost skipped led to Google Summer of Code 2023 at Postman. In my sophomore year I joined Niti.AI as a founding engineer. I joined romanticizing startups; working inside one only pulled me closer, and showed how demanding it is to build something that lasts. Owning systems for some of the largest Indian enterprises taught me that reliability is the product, and that ownership means living with the consequences of your decisions. At VectorShift, scaling AI systems from early startups to massive Enterprise customers clarified how I like to work: own hard problems, thrive in ambiguity, and ship execution people can trust.
I am now an MEng student in Computer Science at Cornell. I want to keep building as an engineer and owner of hard problems. Currently obsessed with building AI agents that automate the boring parts of life, and going deeper into LLM inference systems.
Experience
Cornell University
2026 – May 2027Master of Engineering (MEng), Computer Science
Software Engineer · VectorShift (YC S23)
Jul 2025 – Jul 2026- Built a text-to-workflow AI agent in Rust that creates and edits validated multi-node workflows across 300+ integrations, cutting 80% of the time and know-how needed to assemble complex workflow graphs.
- Led the Python SDK rewrite with 12 platform primitives, IDE autocompletion, validation, automated Mintlify docs, and CI for API drift; shipped REST and WebSocket APIs in Go and Rust to support the new SDK. Onboarded 50+ external developers in 3 months.
Founding Engineer · Niti.AI
Aug 2022 – Jun 2025- Launched a no-code platform so enterprise teams could ship in-app onboarding, personalization, and growth campaigns without engineering releases; adopted by 30+ clients across banks, media, and retail.
- Built multi-tenant Go backends on AWS, Docker, and PostgreSQL with tenant isolation, RBAC, and on-prem deployments, supporting 20+ tenants and 2 on-prem deployments.
Open Source Contributor · Google Summer of Code @ Postman
May 2023 – Sep 2023- Scaled a distributed GitHub crawler to scan 80,000+ files and surface 4,000+ validated OpenAPI/Swagger specs through a search API with typical queries under 250ms.
Back End Intern · 24 Frames Digital
Jul 2022 – Aug 2022- Shipped a real-time chat module for VCM 3.0 (Socket.IO, Node.js, React) and load-tested it with 9,000+ concurrent viewers.
Dwarkadas J. Sanghvi College of Engineering
2020 – 2024B.Tech, Information Technology (Honors in DevOps) · GPA 8.87/10
Logistics Head at DJS Beats; Technical Committee Member at DJS Codestars
Recent projects
All projects →- Roam: AI Tour GuideAI Voice Agent
A mobile app that turns city walks into immersive, AI-narrated heritage tours. GPS-guided navigation takes you stop by stop, Gemini's vision model verifies land…
Achievements
Hackathon Wins
Winner at ETH India, Based Around the World – India, and Smart India Hackathon; bounty wins at Rift Rewind (Riot Games + AWS), Base Onchain Summer, EAS Onchain Summer, and ETH Mumbai. See the projects →
Open Source Contributor
Active contributor across Entire.io, BuidlGuidl, AsyncAPI, and Postman Open Technologies; awarded Google Summer of Code 2023 to build the GitHub OpenAPI Search tool for Postman Labs. See the projects →
Writing
All posts →Why I moved my side projects off Vercel free tiers onto EC2 + Dokploy — and how self-hosting made me ship more, not less.
Contact
Looking for a workplace with high standards and high trust — full-time roles across backend, AI infrastructure, and applied AI, starting May 2027.