Kunal Mahato profile picture

Hello, I'm

Kunal Mahato

AI Software Engineer
Forward Deployed Engineer

M.Eng. Virginia Tech '25 · 5+ years at Samsung & Turvo · now building Agentic AI

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About Me

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Experience

5+ years
AI and Software Engineering

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Education

MEng. in Computer Science
B. Tech. in Computer Science

I am Kunal. I finished my M.Eng. in Computer Science at Virginia Tech in May 2025. Before grad school I spent 5+ years shipping production code at Samsung and Turvo, after a B.Tech from NIT Allahabad.

At Samsung, I spent 3 years across the framework and application layers of Android where I owned Quick Panel tiles, Status Bar, and Notifications inside SystemUI, plus apps like Calendar and Settings. The flagship was foldable phones in 2019, which I built out of Samsung HQ in South Korea. After Samsung I wanted to see how companies start from the ground up, so I joined Turvo, a SaaS startup in supply chain, and spent two years on the platform team owning Shipment, Planning, Transportation, and Execution. The work I am proudest of there was the Intermodal launch and the historical shipment migration that came with it.

By 2023 it was clear AI was going to reshape how software gets built, and I wanted to be on the early side of that. So I came to Virginia Tech for the M.Eng., where most of my projects ended up being full-stack apps with AI in the loop and hackathons taught me to ship fast. Right now I am at a VT lab benchmarking foundational and frontier LLMs (Gemini, OpenAI, LLaMA) on sensitive-data evaluation. What I am looking for next is a team where I can ship features quickly, sit close to customers, demo what I build, iterate on real feedback, and be the front face of the product.

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Experience

Virginia Tech, USA

Role Icon Research Assistant

Duration Icon June 2025 - April 2026

  • Built data-processing pipelines for LLMs in Python integrating OpenAI, Llama, and Gemini APIs through implementation of data-selection strategies including seed-based, embedding-based, alongside domain expert in the loop for ∼1k records.
  • Designed an agentic RAG pipeline (PyTorch + SentenceTransformers) with tool-use for top-K selection, improving relevance and recall and achieving ∼80% F1 in classification tasks.
  • Automated reporting with Pandas/NumPy, producing results across 12 model × label setups and reducing run time by 3x.

Turvo Inc., India

Role Icon Software Engineer

Duration Icon May 2021 - June 2023

  • Enhanced global search and filter efficiency by 10% through advanced Elasticsearch indexing and GraphQL API implementation, improving data retrieval speed and accuracy for supply-chain operations.
  • Architected a resilient Python-based ETL pipeline to launch Intermodal shipment mode, migrating 216,000+ multi-leg records between heterogeneous data stores (MySQL to MongoDB) with zero data loss during a critical schema redesign.
  • Managed reorganization of the Rules Framework into a dynamic Business Rule Management System, enforcing complex role-mode-status compliance constraints across 10+ enterprise clients while decoupling business logic from the core codebase.
  • Built Jenkins CI/CD pipelines for isolated dev setups, cutting deployment time by 40% and improving release reliability.
  • Implemented a resilient Python library for HashiCorp Vault, ensuring secure secret injection with 99.99% uptime for 10 clients.

Samsung, South Korea

Role Icon R&D Engineer

Duration Icon December 2019

  • Integrated backend UI components in Java using Android Framework with system services for foldable-specific notifications, contributing to the global launch of the world’s first foldable phone at Samsung HQ.

Samsung, India

Role Icon R&D Engineer

Duration Icon June 2018 - April 2021

  • Maintained and optimized full-stack codebase for both UI components and robust back-end systems, enhancing performance for 1.48+ billion devices.
  • Optimized System UI (Quick Panel & Notifications) in Java for low end devices, cutting memory use 20% and battery drain 20%, reducing crash rate 85% and boosting user satisfaction to 4.4/5 across 1M+ devices.
  • Handled 5 Application and Framework modules - Settings, Calendar, QuickPanel, Status-Bar and warning notifications.
  • Upgraded the customer satisfaction metrics by 10% through implementation of Search feature for Quick Panel.
  • Collaborated cross-functionally with teams to build backend data-porting solutions integrating 20+ network operators.
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Education

Virginia Tech.

Location Icon Alexandria, Virginia, USA

Degree Icon Master Of Engineering

Major Icon Computer Science & Applications

Duration Icon August 2023 - May 2025

GPA: 3.93 / 4

Relevant Courses: Software Engineering, Machine Learning, Web Application Development, AI tools for Software Delivery, Cloud Computing, Urban Computing, Usability Engineering, Introduction to Artificial Intelligence.

Motilal Nehru National Institute Of Technology Allahabad

Location Icon Prayagraj, UP, India

Degree Icon Bachelor Of Technology

Major Icon Computer Science & Engineering

Duration Icon July 2014 - May 2018

GPA: 3.53 / 4

Relevant Courses: Data Structures, Analysis of Algorithms, Database Management System, Distributed Systems, Operating Systems, Computer Networks, Cryptography, Object Oriented Modeling.

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Skills

Programming & DBs

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JAVA

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Python

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C++

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PostgreSQL

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MongoDB

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MySQL

Frontend & Web Dev.

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React

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TypeScript

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JavaScript

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HTML/CSS

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Streamlit

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Redux

Backend & API

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Spring

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Node.js

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Express

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FastAPI

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RESTful APIs

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Microservices

AI & Machine Learning

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OpenAI

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AppliedAI

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LLMs (RAG)

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TensorFlow

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Scikit-learn

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PyTorch

Cloud & DevOps

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AWS

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Docker

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CI/CD

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ElasticSearch

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HashiCorp Vault

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AWS CLI

Tools & Platforms

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Git

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JIRA

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IntelliJ

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Kibana

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UNIX

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Projects

UPass Manager

UPass Manager

Date Icon January 2025 - May 2025

Location Icon Virginia Tech

Kubernetes AWS React Node.js MySQL NFC Chart.js
  • Architected Kubernetes-managed Next.js, React, Node.js web app, ensuring 99.9% uptime for 10K+ student records.
  • Cut manual entry 95% with AWS Lambda automating S3 to RDS ingestion and boosted pickups using SES notifications.
  • Improved API speed 50% and secured role-based access via optimized GraphQL/REST endpoints (Express, Apollo, JWT).
  • Halved student wait times with a 100 ms NFC validation pipeline using Socket.IO for real-time distribution.
LifexAI

LifexAI

Date IconApril 2025

Location IconUniversity of Maryland, CP

Vercel Gemini Vision MongoDB Capital One Nessie Tailwind CSS
  • Built LifexAI - AI detective web app integrating Google Gemini Vision API, Capital One Nessie API, and real-time Chart.js dashboards with Tailwind CSS and Framer Motion, boosting anomaly detection accuracy by 30%.
  • Accelerated data loading 50% with Typescript React Query caching & Next.js APIs on Cloudflare Workers.
  • Ensured 99.9% uptime and global delivery via Vercel-hosted frontend and automated CI/CD with Docker.
Gentrification

Gentrification Prediction

Date IconAugust 2024 - December 2024

Location IconVirginia Tech

Feature Engineering Data Viz Geospatial Data Analysis ML EDA
  • Aggregated and fused US Census, Zillow ZHVI, Eviction Lab data into unified time-series geospatial database using ETL pipelines.
  • Developed binary classification models (LR, RF, LightGBM) with 5-fold CV and GridSearchCV achieving 0.77 ROC-AUC.
  • Implemented SHAP to interpret PCA reduced features, mapping components to original socioeconomic variables.
  • Built SARIMAX models to forecast 5-year SEIFA scores, identifying at-risk counties for policy planning.
Book Wonders

Book Wonders

Date Icon January 2024 - May 2024

Location Icon Virginia Tech

React Redux Java MySQL AWS
  • Developed a scalable e-commerce app with login, book browsing, cart, and checkout, supporting 1000+ transactions.
  • Designed responsive pages using React with Context API and Redux, improving load and data flow by up to 30%.
  • Constructed 15+ RESTful APIs in Java with MySQL integration.
  • Deployed on AWS, ensuring high availability and performance.
  • Implemented JWT authentication for secure user sessions.
DoDEx

DoDEx

Date Icon April 2024

Location Icon Bitcamp-Hackathon

LLM RAG Elasticsearch AI Web Scraping
  • Designed an AI-driven ingestion pipeline using Python and RAG to parse unstructured Defense Contract Notices. This architecture extracted structured compliance data with 30% higher accuracy than regex methods.
  • Developed a ground-truth validation framework to benchmark LLM, preventing hallucinations in mission-critical reporting.
Review Me

Review Me

Date IconAugust 2023 - December 2023

Location IconVirginia Tech

Python IoT Raspberry Pi TensorFlow Lite REST API
  • Developed a full-stack peer review platform using MERN stack, following MVC architecture, facilitating peer collaboration and online community building.
  • Implemented hashtag search, notifications, upvote/downvote, and comments for tailored content discovery and engagement.
  • Attained 95% test coverage with Mocha and Chai for reliable code quality, including unit and acceptance testing.
  • Enhanced user experience by 20% through features like post editing, search, notifications, and guest user functionality.
  • Implemented secure user authentication using JSON Web Tokens (JWT), ensuring encrypted and stateless communication.