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Harsh Popat

AI-Enabled Backend & DevSecOps Engineer

I build secure, scalable backend systems with integrated AI capabilities, combining DevOps automation and cybersecurity best practices.

I have passion for building secure, scalable backend systems that integrate AI and machine learning capabilities. I bring together expertise in cloud infrastructure, DevOps automation, and cybersecurity to deliver high-performance applications. From designing intelligent APIs to managing CI/CD pipelines and securing deployments, I thrive at the intersection of backend development, AI integration, and secure DevOps practices.

Currently, I’m a Founding Backend AI Engineer at Adden.AI, where I design and build scalable, ML-powered systems using large language models. This role has deepened my expertise in distributed system design, real-time data processing, and integrating machine learning models into production workflows. I’ve worked extensively on performance optimization, API design, and infrastructure scaling, while collaborating across teams to deliver reliable, AI-driven products that handle complex ad tech data and logic at scale.

At MIDAS Lab, I gained hands-on experience fine-tuning large multimodal models and building end-to-end AI applications using frameworks like LangChain, ChromaDB, and LLaVA. I developed strong skills in dataset design, model evaluation, and prompt engineering for scientific reasoning, while deepening my understanding of error analysis in LLMs, collaborative research, and publishing in top-tier conferences such as IEEE and AAAI.

Outside of work, I enjoy hitting the gym, playing volleyball, jamming on my guitar, gaming, and getting lost in books and movies.

2024 — PRESENT

Founding Backend AI Engineer Adden.AI

May 2024 — Present

Design and develop intelligent, scalable backend systems powered by LLMs and machine learning. Built Reporting AI to automate multi-platform ad reporting with real-time dashboards and KPI tracking. Developed Smart Audience AI for predictive audience targeting using deep neural networks and multi-source data analysis. Created Monitoring AI to provide real-time anomaly detection, alerts, and AI-driven root-cause analysis for campaign performance. Engineered Budget AI to reduce advertising cost-per-response by dynamically reallocating spend based on performance insights. Built Custom Audience AI to enhance lead quality and conversion rates by activating enriched contact data for pre-outreach ad delivery.

Python FastAPI Docker Authzed Pytorch SQLAlchemy PostgreSQL Git GCP
2023 — 2024

Undergraduate Researcher MIDAS

August 2023 — December 2024

Developed an end-to-end voice chatbot which transcribed audio, generated embeddings with LangChain, stored in ChromaDB, processed inquiries and converted back to speech for seamless user interaction.

Introduced and created GeoVQA, a multimodal math dataset, to enhance LLMs capabilities in geometry. Fine-tuned LLaVA models, achieving superior performance over GPT-4 on the PGPS9K benchmark.

We proposed MoRA, a framework that uses GPT-4o to iteratively fix comprehension, conceptual, and calculation errors in LLMs, boosting Llama-3-70B accuracy by up to 16% on benchmarks like SciEval, MMLU, and PhysicsQA.

Tensorflow Pytorch Scikit-learn LangChain ChromaDB Whisper Bark

Secure Property Rental/Sale Website

A secure web application for property transactions with distinct buyer and seller interfaces.
FastAPI SQLAlchemy PostgreSQL Next.js React Solidity Ethereum Tailwind CSS

WikiEase - Android Mobile Application

Android app integrating Wikipedia content with AI-powered summarization for faster, smarter reading.
Kotlin Jetpack Compose Room Coroutines Wikipedia API OpenAI API

Mood-Based Song Classifier and Recommender System

ML pipeline that infers user mood from listening history and recommends contextually aligned songs.
Python PyTorch Scikit-learn XGBoost NumPy Pandas Spotify API