Hi, my name is

Pawan Bhandarkar.

[catchphrase tbd]

I’m a full-stack engineer specializing in building (and sometimes designing) AI-powered software for the web. Currently, I’m building helping make AGI happen at xAI

About Me

I’m passionate about building products that people want. I particularly enjoy delivering value through intuitive and visually stunning products that solve real problems.

I generally prioritize getting products into the hands of my customers quickly and iterating based on feedback, rather than sweating the little things and trying to always be perfect

I’m always looking for new challenges and opportunities to learn and grow as a software engineer, and I’m excited to see what the future holds.

Experiences

Dec 2024 - Present

xAI

Member of Technical Staff

Helping make AGI happen

Jan 2024 - Dec 2024

Converge Lab

Founding Engineer

Rapidly built and launched an LLM-powered hardware co-designer that helps Field Application Engineers find, compare, and evaluate electronic components using natural language. Designed and developed the frontend with features like generative UI, human-in-the-loop feedback, and tiered access control. Contributed to FastAPI RAG backend using Pinecone, Elasticsearch, and Langchain. Built data extraction pipelines for processing PDF datasheets.

Jun 2023 - Aug 2023

TuneIn Radio

Software Engineer Intern, Platform

Added support for live streaming metadata for over 120K radio stations, which contributes to enhanced user experience and content discovery for search on the TuneIn platform, while aligning with TuneIn’s core values - Customer Centricity, Operational Excellence and Teamwork.

Nov 2021 - Apr 2022

Team AIBOD Inc.

Software Engineer 2

Led end-to-end development of several full-stack projects, including a microservice that handles biometric payments for an unmanned stored and a search system for Kyushu Electric that allowed their employees to manage inspection information about buildings.

Jul 2020 - Oct 2021

Software Engineer 1

Contributed to projects in various capacities, including backend development with NodeJS and Python, Web GUI using React and TypeScript and DevOps flows with AWS using EC2, ECS, Docker and CloudWatch in a fast-paced le/SCRUM environment

Feb 2020 - Jun 2020

Software Engineer Intern

Conducted AI Experiments that resulted in a 7% accuracy improvement in the KNN-supervised classifier. Fine tuned a BERT-based model to automate support requests in an apartment intercom system.

Things I've Built

Work in Progress

Journey

Building the future of online education as an AI-powered platform that lets students generate personalized learning journeys based on their interests, prior knowledge, and learning goals. Allows users to learn on the go by generating dynamic podcasts from blogs and long-form text-content

GenAI
Exa AI
NextJS
Supabase

Converge Lab

Seeker

An AI copilot for hardware engineers to search, compare, and analyze electronic components using natural language. I led frontend design and development, while contributing to backend and prompt engineering. Seeker is my most sophisticated project to date.

React
FastAPI
Langchain
Pinecone
ElasticSearch

Figma Designs

ESN

I designed the user interface for the Emergency Social Network project I built for my Foundations of Software Engineering Course at Carnegie Mellon University.

Refriendo

Refriendo was a freelancing project I took up for a startup in my home town. I designed the mobile UI using Figma and built the frontend using React and Ionic Capacitor.

Portfolio

Every element of this portfolio was designed and developed from scratch with inspirations taken from multiple other web developers’ portfolios.

TypeScript

Typescript is my preferred language for building applications for the Web, in team settings. The type system helps me catch bugs before they happen, and the language is very expressive.

Technical Skills