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About Me

I'm a Software Development Engineer at AWS, working on the backend systems behind AWS Glue Data Catalog and Lake Formation. I work across the stack — core service logic, event-driven Lambda pipelines, infrastructure-as-code, and the test and deployment tooling around them — shipping customer-facing features, expanding services into new AWS regions, and improving reliability and security of high-traffic production systems.

My path into distributed systems ran through data and ML. I hold an M.S. in Computer Science (Data Science specialization) from the University of Southern California (USC) and a B.E. in Information Science as a Silver Medallist. Along the way I built ML and NLP systems — including a summer on NVIDIA's RAPIDS team — and co-authored two US patents and two publications.

Contact Details

Shaswat Anand
Greater Seattle Area (Redmond, WA)
 shaswatanand.ai@gmail.com

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Work

Amazon Web Services (AWS)

Software Development Engineer II • May 2024 - Present

AWS Glue Data Catalog / Lake Formation

• Designed and rolled out a distributed caching layer on the service's authorization path — a tiered (L1/L2) cache with encryption and config-tunable timeouts — staged safely into production regions, reducing auth latency p90 by 90% and increasing cache hit rate by over 200%.
• Expanded the data-catalog service into 7 new AWS regions, strengthening the region-launch automation, launch-readiness milestones, and region-conditional configuration used to bring services up in new geographies.
• Drove major features for a large-scale data-catalog service, extending its API surface to support a new catalog model across partitions, search, and metadata operations, with a safe allowlist-gated rollout coordinated across multiple packages.
• Owned a new resource-metering pipeline end-to-end — event-processing and aggregation Lambdas with idempotency, dead-letter queues, and latency metrics, plus the supporting infrastructure (DynamoDB, Kinesis, IAM) as code.
• Led a cross-team workstream to accelerate deployment velocity, moving service pipelines toward continuous delivery and removing manual release steps and gates.
• Led remediation of a production security vulnerability class and raised the reliability bar for high-traffic services (exception handling, search-query scaling, alarming, dead-letter handling).

Good Code

Senior Software Engineer• February 2023 - May 2024

• Built and enhanced enterprise data-visualization products using React and TypeScript.
• Maintained and contributed to open-source data-visualization and UI-component projects like Reaviz.

NVIDIA

NLP Engineering Intern • May 2022 - August 2022

• Worked with the RAPIDS team on analysing, designing, and implementing optimized GPU algorithms for large-scale data analytics and machine learning.
• Boosted the API coverage in cuML and cuDF by adding and improving around 7 features.

Query.AI

Senior Software Engineer • August 2020 - July 2021

• Minimized misclassified user intents by over 50% by redesigning the Natural Language Processing(NLP) features.
• Scaled the API contracts by developing more than 10 REST APIs at the backend.
• Improved access to the NLP and more than 4 other features by developing user interface at the frontend.
• Contributed to open source NLP libraries like Rasa NLU by adding 2 features to it.
• Assisted the team in acquiring intellectual properties by co-authoring 2 patents.
• Supported industry-academia interaction by supervising a 3 student team in building a mobile application for the product.

Software Engineer • August 2019 - August 2020

• Conceptualized the Data Science foundations of the product's analytics features by developing more than 1 prototypes of Machine Learning(ML) and Deep Learning(DL) models.
• Developed an optimised model for anomaly detection by developing an Autoencoder model using TensorFlow.

Nuclei

Android Developer Intern • February 2019 - July 2019

• Empowered at least 2 financial enterprises in delivering Recharge and Bill Payment services by developing modular SDKs.

Query.AI

Software Engineering Intern • June 2018 - July 2018

• Enhanced the cognitive console product’s performance by over 20% by optimising it’s AI features and ML models.

Education

University of Southern California, Los Angeles

Masters in Computer Science (Specialization in Data Science) • August 2021-May 2023
GPA: 3.80/4.00


M.S. Ramaiah Institute of Technology, Bangalore

Bachelors in Information Science and Engineerig • August 2015-August 2019
CGPA: 9.60/10.00


Delhi Public School, New Delhi

High School • April 2015
Result: 94.2%

Don Bosco Academy, Patna

Senior Secondary School • April 2013
Result: 90%

Skills

  • C/C++
  • Java
  • Python
  • Typescript/JavaScript
  • SQL
  • Android Development
  • Web Development


  • • Distributed systems & event-driven architecture — microservices, REST APIs, caching

  • • AWS — Lambda, DynamoDB, Kinesis, CDK, CloudFormation, Elasticsearch/OpenSearch, IAM

  • • CI/CD, Infrastructure as Code, observability & operational excellence

  • • Frameworks like React, Angular and Flask; strong on Linux systems

  • • Turning ambiguous problems into shipped, durable solutions; collaborating and leading across teams

Projects

AI agent for GO Board Game

Python, Shell script & JavaScript

Built an AI agent using alpha-beta min-max algorithm with dynamic iterative depth for 5*5 GO board. Also provided a user interface through a web application for excellent user experience with a win probability of more than 80%.

Recommendation System

Python, PySpark, NLTK, Spacy

Created a XGBoost Regressor model to recommend restaurants to users by predicting their rating for each outlet. Achieved the best performing model award among more than 250 students in Data Mining

Hidden Markov Model part-of-speech tagger

Python

Implemented a HMM for POS tagging with accuracy greater than 95% for multiple languages like Italian, Japanese and Urdu.

Handwritten Digit Recognition from scratch

Python

Designed a multilayer perceptron model to recognise handwritten digits without using any external libraries.

Password Cracking Tool

Python

Developed a security assessment tool to test the vulnerability of a user's account by finding the time required to crack his/her password using simple brute-force attacking techniques. It has two versions for use - as a Desktop Application( Windows & Linux) as well as a Web UI for easy user access.

IR Remote Controlled Car

Arduino

Built an Infrared Remote Controlled Car using Arduino. It was developed as an IEEE project by a team of five members. Contributed towards it Circuit design and Programming fields.

Publications

Nature-Inspired Techniques for Data Security in Big Data

IGI Global (2019)

Inspired computing is based on biomimcry of natural occurrences. It is a discipline in which problems are solved using computer models which derive their abstractions from real-world living organisms and their social behavior. It is a branch of machine learning that is very closely related to artificial intelligence. This form of computing can be effectively used for data security, feature extraction, etc. It can easily be integrated with different areas such as big data, IoT, cloud computing, edge computing, and fog computing for data security. The chapter discusses some of the most popular biologically-inspired computation algorithms which can be used to create secured framework for data security in big data like ant colony optimization, artificial bee colony, bacterial foraging optimization to name a few. Explanation of these algorithms and scope of its application are given. Furthermore, case studies are presented to help the reader understand the application of these techniques for security in big data.

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A Study of Use Cases for Smart Contracts using Blockchain Technology

IGI Global (2018)

Blockchain technology is an emerging and rapidly growing technology in the current world scenario. It is a collection of records connected through cryptography. They play a vital role in smart contracts. Smart contracts are present in blockchains which are self-controlled and trustable. It can be integrated across various domains like healthcare, finance, self-sovereign identity, governance, logistics management and home care, etc. The purpose of this article is to analyze the various use cases of smart contracts in different domains and come up with a model which may be used in the future. Subsequently, a detailed description of a smart contract and blockchain is provided. Next, different case-studies related to five different domains is discussed with the help of use case diagrams. Finally, a solution for natural disaster management has been proposed by integrating smart contract, digital identity, policies and blockchain technologies, which can be used effectively for providing relief to victims during times of natural disaster.

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Patents

Artificial Intelligence-Assisted Information Technology Data Management and Natural Language Playbook System

U.S. Patent Number 10846342

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Virtual Data Lake System Created With Browser-based Decentralized Data Access And Analysis

U.S. Patent Number 11397832

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