Shalu Panwar

full-stack ai engineer // voice · genai · agents

01 summary

Full-stack AI engineer with 7+ years building and scaling AI-native and agentic systems — Voice AI (STT/TTS/S2S), GenAI/LLMs, RAG — on a MERN and DevOps foundation. Zero-to-one builder: 3 AI products shipped as founder-CTO with a $150K pre-seed raise; currently leading speech-model training at Plivo.

02 experience

oct 2025 — present

Senior AI Engineer · Plivo

  • Led a 3-person core team across STT/TTS/S2S model training and fine-tuning, owning technical direction and delivery
  • Fine-tuned Whisper-large-v3-turbo and Nemotron for Hindi/Hinglish, matching Deepgram Nova-3 and Sarvam on WER and SER benchmarks
  • Built a custom data-generation pipeline blending open-source, internal, and synthesized speech to close a 5,000+ hour data gap
  • Fine-tuned Chatterbox and Kokoro TTS for native Hindi support; prototyped a speech-to-LLM adapter for direct S2S understanding
oct 2022 — jul 2025

CTO & Co-Founder · TRIKL

  • Shipped 3 AI products in 18 months; raised $150K pre-seed; built and led a 5-person team with OKR-driven hiring and growth frameworks
  • LinkedIn AI content platform: custom-trained GPT-3.5 on 20K+ viral posts (90% faster copywriting); scaled to 5K+ users on SOC 2-compliant infra; AI outreach engine lifted lead-gen 70%
  • AdsEther: AI video ads in 175+ languages via 500+ AI actors — HeyGen, ElevenLabs, Synthesia behind secure RAG-backed microservices; MVPs for 7 D2C brands
  • Community platform: unified Discord, Telegram & WhatsApp for 140K+ members across 10 clients — RAG on Pinecone/Atlas with PII redaction and abuse alerts
aug 2021 — mar 2022

Co-Founder · WeCrat

  • Built a WordPress marketplace for 200+ artisans; led a cross-functional team of 6+; bootstrapped to $15K ARR
aug 2019 — nov 2021

Tech Consultant, Global Risk & Compliance · Capgemini

  • Led compliance audits (PCI, SOX, SoD, QUID) at 100% accuracy across 35+ applications; reduced manual tasks by 70%
  • Managed 50K+ user records and 78 business-critical apps for Disney across SQL, Linux, and Windows environments; promoted in 2020

03 skills

voice ai

STT/TTS/S2S training & fine-tuning · Whisper · Nemotron · Chatterbox · Kokoro

ai / ml

LLM fine-tuning · prompt engineering · RAG · evals · Pinecone · Atlas Vector DB · OpenAI · DALL·E

languages

JavaScript (MERN) · TypeScript · Python · Next.js · Tailwind · Zustand · Ant Design

tools & infra

AWS · GCP · Firebase · Git/GitHub · CI/CD · Docker · n8n · Jira · Confluence

04 education & honors

2015 — 2019

B.Tech · IIT Bombay

  • Undergraduate Research Award for contributions to concrete technology research
  • Research Intern, ÉTS Montréal (2018); co-authored 2 papers at ISAP-APE 2019 (paper 1, paper 2)
  • Institute Organizational Special Mention; mentored 12 freshmen; Ambrose Otieno award for multi-sport excellence
2022

Hackathons & Side Builds

  • Winner, ETHIndia 2022 — the world's largest Web3 hackathon; 10+ international Web3 hackathon wins
  • Karatpay — launched an Android gold-trading app for an early-stage startup, built with Expo