Software Engineer · Building products end-to-end

Ashwin
Kothawade.

Engineer building software that ships — across product, platform & security.

Role
Software Engineer · Akatsuki AI
Impact
Grew revenue ¥10M → ¥280M (28×)
Based in
Remote (Pune) / Tokyo
Studying
B.Tech CS · IIITDM Jabalpur · CPI 8.9
LeetCode
Knight · 2043 · 850+ solved
§ 01 About

A generalist who likes building end-to-end.

I enjoy building things end-to-end — shipping product features users feel, wiring up the infrastructure behind them, and breaking what I build to make sure it holds.

My work spans full-stack development, cloud-native systems, and applied security. I've shipped at startups, research labs, and a Tokyo-based AI studio.

Outside work I contribute to open source — currently MedPlat, a Digital Public Good for medical infrastructure (C4GT 2025) — grind algorithms, and tinker with explainable-AI projects.

0×
Revenue growth on products I shipped · ¥10M → ¥280M
0.0
CPI · IIITDM Jabalpur
0+
DSA problems solved · Knight on LeetCode
0
Engineering roles shipped across
§ 02 Selected work

Eight engagements — Tokyo to remote labs.

Product, platform and research roles across an AI studio, a fintech, a gaming unicorn, an AI-first social startup, public-good healthcare, and an institute.

  1. Now
    Jun 2026 — Present

    Akatsuki AI Technologies — Software Engineer

    Remote (Pune) / Tokyo, Japan · Hybrid product / services AI studio

    Converted from intern to full-time. I joined when annual revenue was ¥10M; the products I built and led grew it to ¥280M within a year (28×), with ¥540M targeted next.

    • Honyaku — shipped a multi-tenant translation SaaS (EN↔JA text, image, PDF in Slack) to production: Slack OAuth, Stripe billing, usage metering, an ops console, and 28+ monitoring policies on GCP Cloud Run.
    • Honyaku AI pipeline — event-driven routing of Slack events to Google Gemini + Cloud Vision OCR with DB-backed dedup, per-workspace rate limiting, and AES-256 token encryption behind Cloud Armor.
    • Red Baron (client) — led an AI motorcycle appraisal + flyer platform (Next.js + FastAPI, Vertex AI Gemini, YOLOv8, Playwright) rendering print-ready 30-vehicle PDF flyers in ~30–60s.
    Next.jsFastAPIGeminiStripeCloud RunTerraform
  2. Oct 2025 — May 2026

    Akatsuki AI Technologies — SWE Intern

    Remote (Pune) / Tokyo, Japan · Platform, security & data foundations

    Built the cloud, security, and data groundwork the revenue products shipped on.

    • KDDI AI platform (client) — led the cloud infra: 2,400+ lines of Terraform for a secure multi-env GCP setup (Cloud Run, private Cloud SQL, VPC, Cloud Armor), Workload Identity Federation CI/CD, and multi-region Gemini failover.
    • Security pipeline — a reusable 4-stage Cloud Build scanner (Gitleaks, Trivy, Semgrep, Checkov + AI review) catching secrets, CVEs and misconfigs before production across every repo.
    • Carreros — a job-search product aggregating 144k+ jobs across all 47 Japanese prefectures into Azure AI Search with 25+ filters, served via Azure Functions + React.
    TerraformGCPAzureCloud BuildCloud ArmorPython
  3. Jul 2025 — Oct 2025

    smallcase — Backend Intern

    Remote - Bengaluru · Loan-against-Mutual-Funds platform · SIB integration

    Shipped security, reliability and API features across the South Indian Bank integration stack in Go, MongoDB and Redis.

    • Two-stage Bank Verification API (Penny Drop + Name Match) with abuse guards, retry limits, blocked-state handling and encrypted PII — gating loan submission on verified bank ownership.
    • Redis caching layer in front of MongoDB for ~8k mutual-fund ISINs — batch MGET reads, pipelined writes, non-blocking SCAN invalidation, 90-min TTL.
    • Field-level encryption for LSP credentials (API secrets, eKYC tokens, passwords) with backward-compatible auto-encrypt/decrypt on writes and reads.
    • Integrated SIB Drawing Power API end-to-end with full unit-test coverage; replaced hardcoded interest rates with dynamic ROI sourced from signed agreements.
    GoMongoDBRedisRESTEncryption at RestFintech
  4. Jun 2025 — Aug 2025

    Mobile Premier League — SWE Intern

    Pune, India · Data Engineering Platform

    Built full-stack features on a scalable Data Engineering Platform serving downstream consumers.

    • Designed RESTful APIs and 11+ dynamic frontend pages in React + Spring Boot.
    • Integrated Kafka + Apache Camel for real-time streaming across microservices.
    • Implemented gRPC inter-service communication to reduce latency.
    ReactSpring BootKafkagRPCApache Camel
  5. Startup
    engagement

    Sagemelon — SWE · Web & Mobile

    Remote · AI-first social media · podcast-friendly

    Helped build the web app and mobile app for a social-media startup where users record podcast-style stories — and where an AI companion serves location-aware stories that change as the listener moves through the world.

    • Story creation — record and publish podcast-style audio stories on a social feed.
    • Location-aware AI stories — AI-generated audio matched to the listener's current location.
    • Autoplay walking-mode — new stories swap in as the user moves; the feed listens to where you are.
    • Social graph — profiles, follow / unfollow, and a discovery feed.
    React NativeNext.jsNode.jsGCPTerraformAIGeolocationAudio
  6. May 2025 — Aug 2025

    Argusoft / MedPlat — SWE Intern

    Remote · Digital Public Good · Healthcare

    Built dashboards and AI-powered tooling for a digital public-good in healthcare — and contributed to the C4GT 2025 open-source track on its AI-enabled dashboard builder.

    • Built 7+ React dashboards with reusable components and Context API state.
    • Integrated AI query system handling 100+ daily requests — reduced reporting time by 40%.
    • Shipped 6+ features on the dashboard builder including an NLP layer for natural-language data interaction and visualization.
    ReactJAVANLPAIC4GT DMP'2025
  7. Jun 2024 — Nov 2024

    IIITDM Jabalpur — Backend Intern (ERP)

    Jabalpur, India · 3,000+ user platform

    Built and maintained the College ERP platform used by 3,000+ students, faculty and staff.

    • Led the elective allocation algorithm and course-management modules.
    • Migrated frontend from Django templates to a modern React interface.
    DjangoReactAlgorithms
  8. Dec 2023 — Aug 2024

    IIITDM Jabalpur — Research Intern

    Jabalpur, India · IoT network anomaly detection · 9 months

    End-to-end research on IoT network anomaly detection.

    • Analyzed network logs with CICFlowmeter, detecting threats with 97% accuracy.
    • Instrumented systems with Prometheus, sFlow-rt and Node Exporter; visualized in Grafana.
    • Identified attack methods covering 70%+ of common malware patterns.
    CICFlowmeterPrometheusGrafanasFlow-rt
§ 03 Projects

Things I've built.

Selected product, open-source and security work.

01
Product · Multi-tenant SaaS

Honyaku — Slack Translation

Global teams lost time to manual English–Japanese translation. Shipped a production multi-tenant SaaS that translates text, images and PDFs inside Slack via Gemini + Cloud Vision — with Slack OAuth, Stripe billing and usage metering. Now a live, revenue-generating product.

Next.jsNode.jsGeminiStripeCloud Run
02
Client · AI + Full Stack

Red Baron — Flyer Generator

Dealership flyers were assembled by hand, one bike at a time. Led an AI appraisal + flyer platform (Vertex AI Gemini, YOLOv8 cropping, Playwright PDF) that renders print-ready 30-vehicle flyers in ~30–60s; deployed on GCP via Terraform.

FastAPINext.jsYOLOv8GeminiTerraform
03
Open Source · C4GT 2025

MedPlat AI Dashboard Builder

Non-technical health teams depended on engineers for every dashboard. Built an AI dashboard builder with an NLP layer for natural-language data queries so they could self-serve. Shipped 6+ features; selected top 100 of 4,200+ applicants for C4GT 2025's DMP track.

ReactNLPAIDPG
04
Product · Co-founder

LaundriX

Hostel laundry meant long queues and no visibility into machine availability. Co-built a full-stack platform end-to-end with real-time tracking, slot booking and queue management — giving residents live status and removing the guesswork.

ReactNode.jsMongoDBWebSockets
05
Security

CyberFortress

APIs were shipping with no consistent security gate or inventory. Built a framework wired into Jenkins CI/CD that discovers, catalogs and tests each API — verifying 15 of 16 APIs secure at 60% OWASP API Top 10 coverage.

JenkinsOWASPAPI Security
§ 04 Education

Where I studied.

2022 — Present

B.Tech · Computer Science & Engineering

Indian Institute of Information Technology, Design and Manufacturing — Jabalpur

CPI · 8.9
— Also certified in —
  • 01Foundations of Cybersecurity
  • 02Connect & Protect — Networks & Network Security
  • 03Tools of the Trade — Linux & SQL
  • 04Automate Cybersecurity Tasks with Python
  • 05The Joy of Computing Using Python
§ 05 Tech stack

Tools I reach for.

Languages

  • JavaScript
  • TypeScript
  • Go
  • Java
  • Python
  • C / C++
  • SQL

Frontend

  • React
  • Next.js
  • React Native
  • Zustand
  • Tailwind

Backend

  • Node.js / Express
  • FastAPI
  • Go
  • Spring Boot
  • gRPC
  • Apache Kafka

AI & Data

  • Google Gemini
  • Vertex AI
  • YOLOv8
  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB
  • Redis
  • BigQuery

Cloud & DevOps

  • GCP
  • AWS
  • Azure
  • Terraform
  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Cloud Build
  • GitHub Actions

Observability

  • Prometheus
  • Grafana
  • Cloud Monitoring
  • sFlow-rt

Security

  • Cloud Armor / WAF
  • AES-256 & JWT / OAuth
  • Gitleaks · Trivy · Semgrep
  • OWASP API Top 10
§ 06 Recognition

Rankings & awards.

  1. Top 22

    Flipkart Grid 6.0 — Semifinalist Of 17,000 teams nationwide

    Hackathon
  2. Top 5

    IIT Bombay TechFest — Finalist Of 600 teams

    Hackathon
  3. Knight

    LeetCode — 2043 rating Top 2.5% · 850+ problems solved

    Competitive Programming
  4. Pupil

    Codeforces 180+ problems solved

    Competitive Programming
  5. Top 1%

    SWAYAM / NPTEL coursework National online learning platform

    Coursework
§ 07 Beyond code

Captain. Athlete. Mentor.

I lead from the locker room as much as the project table — team first, always.

— Cricket · Captain —

Led IIITDM to the 5th Inter-IIIT title.

Captain of the IIITDM Jabalpur cricket team. Held the squad together through the run that won the institute's 5th Inter-IIIT Cricket Championship (2023). Multiple campus medals along the way.

🏆 Inter-IIIT '23 ★ Captain ★ Multi-medalist
— Athletics · Inter-IIIT —

Bronze · 800m
Silver · 4×400m relay

Track athlete at the Inter-IIIT championships — medals across the 800m and the 4×400m relay. Plus a string of medals in athletics meets back on campus.

● Bronze · 800m ● Silver · 4×400m
— Mentorship —

Student guide to my juniors.

Helped first- and second-years with coding, placement prep, and finding their feet at IIITDM. Leadership for me starts with showing up for the team — on the field, in the lab, and on the call.

★ Student Guide ★ Placement mentor
§ 08 Contact

Let's build
something together.

ashwinkothavade@gmail.com
LocationPune, India · Open to remote
ResponseUsually within 24 hours

— Drop me a note —