Ashish Santikari

AI Augumented Software Engineer

Berlin, Germany

Summary

Software Engineer with 10+ years shipping full-stack and AI-powered products at B2B SaaS and B2C companies. Built and scaled production LLM systems — including RAG pipelines and conversational AI chatbots serving 130,000+ students under sub 500 ms latency Comfortable owning the hard technical decisions: system architecture, cross-functional scope alignment, and the kind of foundational work that makes future features faster to ship. Passionate about building AI systems that are genuinely useful — not just technically impressive — and about growing engineering teams that hold themselves to that same standard.

Skills

Languages: JavaScript, TypeScript, Python3
Technologies: React, NodeJS, ExpressJS, FastAPI, AWS, Git, Redis
Databases: PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Apache Kafka, Chroma DB
Infrastructure: Kubernetes, AWS
ML & AI: Numpy, PyTorch, HuggingFace, LangChain, LangGraph, LangSmith, Supervised Fine Tuning, Low Rank Adaptation (LoRA), Quantized Low Rank Adaptation (Q-LoRA)

Experience

Senior Software Engineer – AI

Dec 2023 - Mar 2025

International Hochschule (IU) GmbH · Berlin, DE

    Tech Lead (Part Time Freelance)

    Oct 2023 - Apr 2025

    SuccessPro · Remote

      Senior Software Engineer

      Dec 2022 - Feb 2023

      Omnipresent · Berlin, DE

        Expert Software Engineer (Senior Software Engineer)

        May 2021 - Nov 2022

        Shop Apotheke · Berlin, DE

          Senior Software Engineer

          Feb 2020 - Apr 2021

          finleap connect GmbH · Berlin, DE

            Senior Software Engineer

            Dec 2016 - Dec 2019

            Enquero Global LLP · Bengaluru, IN

              Software Engineer

              Feb 2014 - Nov 2016

              Infosys Limited · Bengaluru, IN

                Projects

                Shop Apotheke Shopping Cart | Shop Apotheke

                • Designed and executed a progressive rollout architecture for the mono repo, integrating with microservices to streamline feature rollout.
                • Resulted in a 32% reduction in lead time for feature rollout, resulting in faster time to market.
                • Successfully migrated the guest newsletter subscription feature from a monolith system to a modern microservices-based architecture.
                • Achieved a 25% reduction in the time it takes to subscribe to the newsletter, resulting in increased potential sales opportunities.

                Syntea | IU

                Dec 2023 - Mar 2025
                • Developed features on Deep Dialog Learning resulting in increase of student engagement by 27% on month-over-month basis.
                • Implemented a Conversation Analysis platform to collect, review, and aggregate quality metrics on Syntea conversations, enabling stakeholders to identify pain points and prioritize feature amendments.
                • Extended MS Teams Copilot to integrate Syntea directly into Teams, providing students with immediate, context-aware course assistance.

                Multicurrency and i18N (Cart) | Atlassian

                • Designed and implemented a checkout system supporting multiple currencies and languages for customers in Japan. This increased annual sales by $6 million.
                • Led the migration of the shopping cart application from AngularJS to React. This improved development speed by 25%.
                • Developed the first scalable shopping cart solution at Atlassian that supports multiple currencies and languages.

                Experiments

                'Paisa.app' Optimizations

                UI/UX optimizations for a forked version of Paisa.app. Fixed critical bug where level 3 expansion of Accounts breaks the layout, and replacing the legacy tabular view with a stable, responsive grid system using AgGrid.

                Open Source UI/UX Re-design

                Local AI & Workflow Automation

                Running Qwen3 4B model locally on MacBook M1 Pro to power personalized workflows: Auto-tagging emails in Thunderbird, integrating with Docker MCP server for a 'Second Brain' workbench in Obsidian, and automating note sync via Git + Rsync to personal cloud and Google Drive with an additional layer of encryption.

                Local LLM Qwen3 Obsidian Docker MCP Automation

                Home Lab & Personal Cloud

                Self-hosted personal cloud infrastructure using Dietpi on Raspberry Pi 4 using DDNS. Supports TailScale's exit node, WAN wide AdGuard blocking, financial ledger management (ledger-cli), self-hosted Bitwarden and secured NAS storage.

                Self-Hosted RPi4 DDNS Wireguard AdGuard Finance NAS Security

                Education

                Ironhack AI Engineering

                2026 Feb - 2026 April

                Ironhack · Berlin

                • Finished an intensive 9-week full-time bootcamp focused on AI engineering, covering machine learning, deep learning, natural language processing, agentic systems, and fine tuning OSS models.

                Bachelor of Engineering in Computer Science

                2013

                Vinayaka Missions University · Chennai, India · 3.5 GPA

                Certifications

                AI Engineering

                2026

                Ironhack

                Certified Kubernetes Application Developer (CKAD)

                2023

                The Linux Foundation · ID: LF-cntme41cnk