NY Nikhil Reddy Yerragondu

Open to work · United States · On-site / Hybrid / Remote

Nikhil Reddy
Yerragondu

AI Engineer building reliable GenAI, LLM evaluation, and multimodal AI systems that move beyond demos and work in real‑world environments.

Junior AI Engineer at Cheaha Infosys LLC MS Computer Science, UAB

Portrait of Nikhil Reddy Yerragondu
91.2%
Accuracy on multimodal emotion recognition — +7.39% over baseline
50+
Multi‑step LLM agent workflows evaluated for failure modes
12
CT & MRI datasets benchmarked in annotation‑free segmentation
2,000+
Enterprise authentication workflows supported in IAM operations
01

About

I’m an AI Engineer focused on building reliable GenAI, LLM evaluation, and multimodal AI systems that move beyond demos and work in real-world environments.

My work spans LLM-based agent evaluation, human-in-the-loop feedback pipelines, multimodal machine learning, and AI-powered product development. At Handshake, I evaluate multi-step LLM agent workflows by analyzing Plan + Code reasoning traces, identifying failure modes such as hallucinated outputs, data leakage, evaluation shortcuts, unsafe file operations, and misaligned actions. I focus on improving reasoning reliability, reproducibility, model alignment, and evaluation quality for production-scale AI research initiatives.

I’m also building an AI-powered financial decision simulator at Cheaha Infosys, designed to support human decision-making using contextual AI reasoning on real financial data. The system integrates a Machine Unlearning-based AI layer that adapts to individual user behavior and functions as a personalized AI decision assistant, currently in active MVP development.

My research background includes multimodal AI across vision, audio, video, text, and EEG. I developed an attention-based multimodal emotion recognition model combining EEG, audio, and video signals, achieving 91.2% accuracy and improving performance by 7.39% over baseline models. I have also worked on weakly supervised medical image segmentation using sparse annotations to improve segmentation robustness across medical and natural image datasets.

Alongside AI research, I bring strong engineering experience across Python, PyTorch, Hugging Face, Node.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Supabase, Firebase, AWS Cognito, OAuth, SAML, Splunk, ServiceNow, and production debugging workflows.

I’m especially interested in roles where I can build trustworthy GenAI systems, evaluate LLM behavior, develop multimodal ML solutions, and turn AI research into practical products.

02

Experience

  1. Jun 2025 — Present

    1 yr 5 mos

    Junior AI Engineer

    Current

    Cheaha Infosys LLC Full-time Birmingham, Alabama · Hybrid

    • Designing and developing an AI-powered financial decision simulator focused on improving human decision-making through contextual AI reasoning on real financial data.
    • Building the full-stack product foundation using Node.js, TypeScript, PostgreSQL, Supabase, and Tailwind CSS to support scalable MVP development and future AI model integration.
    • Integrating a Machine Unlearning-based AI layer that adapts to individual user behavior and enables the simulator to function as a personalized AI decision assistant, currently in active development.
    • Conducted user research with 25+ participants and competitive analysis to translate real-world financial decision challenges into product requirements, feature priorities, and MVP roadmap decisions.
    • Applying a product-first engineering approach to build a practical AI decision-support system beyond standard AI agent demos.

    Skills Generative AI · Artificial Intelligence (AI) · Node.js · TypeScript · PostgreSQL · Supabase

  2. Oct 2025 — Mar 2026

    6 mos

    AI Engineer

    Handshake Contract United States · Remote

    • Improved production-scale AI training quality across LLM reasoning, multimodal learning, and human-in-the-loop evaluation projects by designing and executing structured evaluation workflows.
    • Evaluated 50+ multi-step LLM agent workflows by analyzing Plan + Code execution traces to identify hallucinations, logical inconsistencies, unsafe behaviors, data leakage, evaluation shortcuts, and scientifically invalid agent actions.
    • Strengthened model alignment and reasoning reliability by stress-testing agent behavior, documenting failure patterns, and improving evaluation consistency across complex AI workflows.
    • Improved multimodal model reliability by validating synchronized image, audio, video, and text inputs for semantic alignment, temporal consistency, and robustness under noisy or ambiguous conditions.
    • Supported conversational AI training by generating structured human-human video and speech interaction datasets for speech, vision, discourse modeling, and human-in-the-loop evaluation.

    Skills Machine Learning Algorithms · Model Validation · Data Leakage · Feature Engineering · Performance Metrics

  3. Feb 2025 — May 2025

    4 mos

    Systems Engineer Intern — Identity & Access Management

    Cheaha Infosys LLC Internship Birmingham, Alabama · Hybrid

    • Supported enterprise IAM operations across 2,000+ authentication workflows by managing user access, account lifecycle requests, and access-control processes.
    • Configured and troubleshot SSO integrations using SAML 2.0, OAuth 2.0, SAML Tracer, and Postman, resolving token, assertion, and attribute-mapping issues across enterprise applications.
    • Monitored authentication logs and incidents using Splunk, CrowdStrike, and ServiceNow to identify access anomalies, authentication failures, and operational issues.
    • Collaborated with engineering and security teams to support secure, compliant, and SLA-driven access operations across enterprise systems.

    Skills OAuth · Splunk · SAML 2.0 · PingFederate · ServiceNow · CrowdStrike

  4. Sep 2024 — Jan 2025

    5 mos

    Software Developer — Founding Team

    Startup

    Beep Self-employed Birmingham, Alabama · On-site

    • Built an early-stage secure messaging platform as part of a 2-person founding team, developing responsive frontend components and user interaction flows to improve prototype usability and product navigation.
    • Integrated Firebase and AWS Cognito authentication workflows to support secure user onboarding, login, session management, and MVP access control.
    • Conducted user research with 50+ participants to identify usability gaps and translate feedback into feature improvements and UX design updates.
    • Implemented analytics tracking to measure user engagement and feature adoption, helping guide data-driven MVP decisions and product prioritization.
    • Rapidly prototyped, tested, and iterated core messaging workflows in an agile startup environment to support early product validation.

    Skills Python · User Experience (UX) · Android Development · Firebase · AWS Cognito

  5. Mar 2024 — Jun 2024

    4 mos

    Data Engineering Intern

    Talent Engines LLC Internship Birmingham, Alabama · Hybrid

    • Modernized data collection for a legal recruiting firm by replacing manual scraping processes with automated Python-based extraction pipelines across 250+ websites.
    • Designed and built end-to-end web scraping pipelines using Python, Selenium, BeautifulSoup, sitemaps, and automation tools to extract structured attorney, law firm, and recruiting data.
    • Transformed unstructured web data into clean, structured datasets supporting ETL workflows, Neo4j graph database relationships, n8n automation, and recruiting intelligence pipelines.
    • Led a team of 7 engineers by coordinating scraping tasks, reviewing data outputs, resolving blockers, and ensuring timely delivery of high-quality datasets.
    • Communicated project progress, technical updates, and delivery status directly to leadership, aligning engineering execution with legal recruiting business goals.

    Skills Project Management · Python · Selenium · BeautifulSoup · Neo4j · ETL

  6. Jun 2022 — Jul 2022

    2 mos

    Machine Learning Intern

    Pantech ProEd Pvt Ltd Internship India · Remote

    • Built computer vision models using Keras and OpenCV for image and activity recognition across varied environments.
    • Improved model robustness through targeted data augmentation techniques, including lighting variation, distortion, and motion blur, boosting model accuracy by 20%.
    • Reduced model training time by 30% through optimized experimentation workflows, preprocessing improvements, and model tuning.
    • Developed visual dashboards to communicate model performance, insights, and experiment results to cross-functional teams.

    Skills Keras · OpenCV · Computer Vision · Data Augmentation

03

Selected work

Research systems, AI products and engineering builds — newest first.

Nov 2025 — Apr 2026

HIERSAM: Anatomy-Driven Hierarchical Pseudo-Supervision for Medical Image Segmentation

  • Designed an annotation-free segmentation framework combining Riemannian spectral clustering over DINO features and Fisher–Rao intensity geometry with DPO-style preference optimization of a SAM-Med2D decoder, guided by a self-supervised anatomical plausibility reward.
  • Benchmarked across 12 CT and MRI datasets with paired statistical testing over 3 runs: closed 90–96% of the gap to fully supervised nnU-Net and improved Dice by 14–22 points over prior annotation-free methods at zero labels.
  • Optimized training cost by freezing the image encoder and tuning only the 14M-parameter decoder (18 GB, 4× A100); produced all tables, ablations, and figures and wrote the manuscript.

SAM-Med2D · DINO · DPO · PyTorch · nnU-Net · Riemannian geometry

Nov 2024 — Jul 2025

Multifold Fusion Attention Variant Network for Emotion Recognition

  • Developed an end-to-end multimodal emotion recognition model combining EEG, audio, and video signals.
  • Designed adaptive fusion and attention-based learning mechanisms to capture spatial, temporal, and channel-specific patterns.
  • Improved accuracy over transformer and MULT-based baselines while reducing computational time and memory usage.
  • Explored multimodal and single-modal learning approaches for robust synchronization across time and frequency domains.

Python · Neural networks · Attention mechanisms · EEG · PyTorch

Jan 2025 — Apr 2025

Generative Image Captioning Using Hybrid Character Approach

  • Built a generative image captioning system using a custom Encoder–Bridge–Decoder architecture.
  • Combined convolutional and recurrent neural networks to generate descriptive image captions from visual inputs.
  • Applied hybrid character-level modeling to improve robustness in noisy or low-resource captioning scenarios.
  • Designed the system to support vision-language generation and image understanding workflows.

Python · CNN · RNN · GANs

Sep 2024 — Jan 2025

Front-End Development of a Real-Time Chat Application

  • Developed a real-time chat application front end using Kotlin, Android SDK, and Android Studio, featuring Firebase Authentication and Firestore for secure login and real-time messaging.
  • Designed a user-friendly UI/UX to enhance engagement and usability, and ensured smooth backend integration by testing and debugging REST APIs with Postman.
  • Leveraged AWS and Firebase for scalable cloud storage and media handling, with Git for version control and collaboration.

Kotlin · Android SDK · Android Jetpack · Firebase · Firestore · Postman

Aug 2024 — Dec 2024

Iterative Local-Global Approximated SVD for Image Denoising

  • Explored an image denoising method based on Iterative Local-Global Approximated Singular Value Decomposition, tailored for small and noisy datasets like CIFAR-10.
  • Reconstructed cleaner images by iteratively applying SVD-based low-rank approximations, working both locally over image patches and globally across the entire image.

Python · Statistics · SVD · NumPy · CIFAR-10

May 2024 — Aug 2024

Advanced Cloud-Based File Upload and Secure Sharing Platform

  • Developed a secure, scalable cloud file upload and sharing system leveraging multiple AWS services; users log in, upload files, and share with up to five recipients via email.
  • Stored files in Amazon S3 with download links delivered through Amazon SES, orchestrated by a serverless Lambda function.
  • Maintained an accurate record of 100% of uploaded files in DynamoDB, with EC2 for hosting and IAM for meticulous access management.

AWS S3 · Lambda · SES · DynamoDB · EC2 · IAM

May 2024 — Aug 2024

Blockchain-Based e-Voting System Using Facial Recognition

  • Built an online voting web application integrating blockchain with facial recognition for security and transparency, using MongoDB for candidates, elections, and users.
  • Developed and deployed smart contracts with Truffle and Ganache, with Ethereum transactions facilitated through MetaMask.
  • Implemented user authentication via facial recognition using OpenCV and face_recognition, plus email verification for enhanced security.

React.js · Python · MongoDB · Truffle · Ganache · MetaMask · OpenCV

Dec 2022 — Apr 2023

Video Forgery Detection Using Hybrid Architecture

  • Advanced video forgery detection with a hybrid CNN–RNN architecture, analyzing video features to improve authenticity verification accuracy.
  • Improved reliability of detecting manipulated content — valuable where video authenticity is critical, such as journalism, security, and legal proceedings.

Neural networks · CNN · RNN · Python

Feb 2023 — Mar 2023

Dynamic Portfolio Website Deployment with AWS EC2

  • Developed a professional site to highlight work, skills, and achievements using HTML, CSS, and JavaScript.
  • Hosted on an AWS EC2 instance for scalability, security, and flexibility, enabling robust performance and seamless updates.

HTML · CSS · JavaScript · AWS EC2

Aug 2022 — Nov 2022

Facial Video Forgery Detection using MesoNet

  • Introduced a facial detection model leveraging transfer learning with pre-trained CNN weights, specifically MesoNet and MesoInception4, to determine whether a video has been forged.
  • Analyzed facial features and movements to detect signs of tampering or manipulation for accurate video authenticity verification.

Neural networks · Scikit-Learn · MesoNet · Transfer learning

More code and experiments on GitHub →

04

Research

IEEE · Peer-reviewed

Multifold Fusion Attention Variant for Emotion Recognition

An attention-based multimodal model fusing EEG, audio and video signals for emotion recognition. Adaptive fusion captures spatial, temporal and channel-specific patterns, reaching 91.2% accuracy — a 7.39% improvement over transformer and MULT-based baselines — while cutting computational time and memory use.

Read on IEEE Xplore →
05

Skills & tooling

AI & machine learning

  • Generative AI
  • Large Language Models (LLM)
  • LLM & agent evaluation
  • Agentic AI systems
  • Human-in-the-loop evaluation
  • Model validation
  • Model alignment
  • Data leakage detection
  • Feature engineering
  • Performance metrics
  • Machine unlearning
  • Preference optimization (DPO)
  • Machine learning
  • Deep learning
  • Neural networks
  • CNN · RNN · GANs
  • Attention & transformers
  • Transfer learning

Multimodal & vision

  • Multimodal machine learning
  • Computer vision
  • Image segmentation
  • Medical imaging (CT / MRI)
  • Emotion recognition
  • EEG signal processing
  • Audio & speech modeling
  • Video forgery detection
  • Image captioning
  • Image denoising & SVD
  • Data augmentation

Frameworks & libraries

  • PyTorch
  • TensorFlow
  • Keras
  • Hugging Face
  • Scikit-Learn
  • OpenCV
  • NumPy
  • Pandas
  • Matplotlib
  • Selenium
  • BeautifulSoup

Backend & data

  • Node.js
  • PostgreSQL
  • Supabase
  • Firebase & Firestore
  • MongoDB
  • Neo4j
  • DynamoDB
  • REST APIs
  • ETL pipelines
  • Web scraping
  • n8n automation

Identity & security

  • SAML 2.0
  • OAuth 2.0
  • SSO integrations
  • PingFederate
  • AWS Cognito
  • Splunk
  • CrowdStrike
  • ServiceNow
  • SAML Tracer

Product & collaboration

  • User research
  • Competitive analysis
  • MVP roadmapping
  • User experience (UX)
  • Analytics instrumentation
  • Agile delivery
  • Project management
  • Team leadership

Languages

  • Python
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • Kotlin
  • SQL
  • MATLAB

Frontend

  • React.js
  • Tailwind CSS
  • HTML & CSS
  • Android SDK
  • Android Studio
  • Android Jetpack

Cloud & platform

  • AWS — EC2, S3, Lambda, SES, IAM, Cognito
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure
  • Git
  • Postman
06

Education

Jan 2024 — Apr 2025

University of Alabama at Birmingham

Master of Science (MS), Computer Science

GPA 3.7 / 4.0

Coursework

Introduction to Computer Science · Data Structures and Algorithms · Machine Learning · Artificial Intelligence · Database Systems · Operating Systems · Software Engineering · Computer Networks · Cybersecurity · Web Development · Cloud Computing · Big Data · Human-Computer Interaction · Advanced Topics in Machine Learning · Quantum Computing

Aug 2019 — Apr 2023

Guru Ghasidas University

Bachelor of Technology (BTech), Computer Science

GPA 3.3 / 4.0

Activities Student member — IEEE Computer Society

Coursework

Introduction to Programming · Data Structures · Algorithms · Computer Organization and Architecture · Operating Systems · Database Systems · Software Engineering · Discrete Mathematics · Computer Networks · Web Development · Introduction to Artificial Intelligence · Human-Computer Interaction · Computer Graphics · Theory of Computation · Programming Languages

Licenses & certifications

  • Working with the OpenAI APIDataCampJun 2026
  • Model Validation 2 — ExpertHandshakeNov 2025
  • Model Validation 1 — TrainerHandshakeNov 2025
  • Oracle Cloud Infrastructure 2025 Certified Foundations AssociateOracleAug 2025
  • Data VisualizationKaggleFeb 2025
  • PandasKaggleFeb 2025
  • Machine LearningUdemyMar 2024
  • Python IntermediateSololearnMar 2024
  • PythonHackerRankFeb 2024
  • Internship on Machine LearningPantech UniversityJul 2022
07

Get in touch

I’m open to roles building trustworthy GenAI systems, evaluating LLM behaviour, developing multimodal ML, and turning AI research into products.

Open to work · United States · On-site, Hybrid or Remote