EXPLORER

HI, I'M AMRUTHA RAO

Builder and Software/AI Engineer

Columbia University student driven to build innovative solutions and make a positive impact through technology and entrepreneurship.

About Me

AI/ML • Startups • Sustainable Technology • Builder • International Awards • Funding • Intern •

I'm a Computer Science student at Columbia University with a passion for AI/ML engineering, startups, and sustainable technology. I have founded and lead multiple projects, some of which have raised funding, won international awards, are patent-pending, and been featured by global organizations.

I've interned at companies like Fidelity Investments, PointOne, Omen, and Credytu, where I've build backend systems and developed ML models. These experiences have sharpened my skills in creating scalable, real-world solutions while collaborating with fast-moving teams.

Projects

Eon

AI life-simulation platform where every choice and interaction shapes an evolving character's story. Architected a scalable FastAPI/PostgreSQL backend with a dual-conversation LLM system for real-time life-simulation and per-character messaging, plus a credit-gated payment system built on Stripe.

TuneTree

AI-powered music generation platform for creating and iteratively refining songs through pairwise preference selection. Next.js/React frontend, FastAPI backend, Supabase for auth/storage, containerized and deployed on AWS EC2. Won 1st Place, Entertainment Track, Columbia Hackathon.

ShadowU

Built platform enabling high schoolers to spend a day-in-the-life with a college student at their university of choice in a way that goes beyond the traditional tour. Built end-to-end with modern web technologies.

Semantic Scout

AI-powered platform using semantic search and real-time research analysis to connect startups with funding and market trends. Scrapes ArXiv for emerging CS technologies and startup databases to build searchable vector spaces.

LabMatch

Platform that automatically generates personalized cold email research requests to professors based on uploaded resumes. Built during Hack Shack, a three-day hacker retreat with 16 of Columbia's most promising founders.

GreenSwing

Lead and co-founded GreenSwing. GreenSwing is a patent-pending device that generates electricity from kinetic energy of door swings. Raised $10k, won 6 international awards, was featured by global organizations, and shipped GreenSwing units to a health clinic in rural Malawi.

EnviroScore

Award-winning iOS app that gamifies and incentivizes the fight against climate change. Won Congressional App Challenge 2nd place and two international hackathon awards.

Social Distance Wristbands

Build and programmed wristbands that beep when within 6 feet of each other, enforcing social distancing. Implemented in my school.

Skills & Technologies

Languages

PythonJavaJavaScriptTypeScriptGoCC++SQLMATLABHTMLCSS

AI/ML

PyTorchScikit-learnLlamaIndexXGBoostPandasNumPyMatplotlib

Frameworks

React.jsNext.jsNode.jsFastAPITailwind CSSGraphQL

Tools

GitDockerAWS (EC2, SageMaker, S3, Lambda, RDS)SupabaseLinux (Ubuntu)Bash

Professional Experience

Fidelity Investments
Software Engineering/Data Science/ML Intern•Boston, MA
June 2026 - August 2026
  • Built and deployed ML models on AWS SageMaker to classify communication escalations, achieving 0.997 recall, for a system processing tens of millions of messages monthly
  • Proposed and built an unsupervised clustering model to uncover patterns invisible to existing labeling systems, after identifying gaps in how they were being categorized
Columbia Data Science Institute
AI/ML Research Intern•New York, NY
August 2025 - Present
  • Co-first-authored a paper accepted to COLM, evaluating LLM agents on MLE-Bench and identifying failure modes in tree-search-based agentic frameworks
  • Designed hyperparameter-tuning interventions that improved AIDE's performance on 7 of 9 benchmark tasks, and diagnosed why the same fix degraded a different agent framework
PointOne
Software Engineering Intern•New York, NY
June 2025 - August 2025
  • Developed components of scalable AI models and backend data pipelines for real-time video, image, and text processing
  • Designed and extended AI systems, benchmarked AI models, analyzing latency, cost, and accuracy trade-offs
Omen
Software Engineering Intern•New York, NY
February 2025 - May 2025
  • Implemented backend pipelines to analyze financial data, including rolling correlations and handling corporate actions
  • Built AI-powered investing mobile app backend with financial chatbot integration and real-time search
Credytu
Software Engineering Intern•New York, NY
October 2024 - December 2024
  • Developed machine learning models (Random Forest, XGBoost, and ensembles) to evaluate loan applications
  • Built framework to compare model performance, enabling iterative improvements and automated optimization
SafeBeat Rx
Research Intern•San Francisco, CA
June 2023 - August 2023
  • Analyzed ECG data and contributed ideas to research meetings and projects at a Y-combinator-backed AI/health startup
  • Researched and conducted outreach to pharmaceutical companies to form partnerships
Selling Energy
Research Intern•Reno, NV
June 2022 - December 2022
  • Conducted market research on electric vehicle charging stations to lay the groundwork for a EV charging stations course
  • Created mathematical models for EV Charging businesses