The story, in plain words
Darkness to light.
I’m Aahil — a software engineer who learned the hard way that the only light is the one you carry. Here’s the honest arc, from no path at all to a seat in the arena.
The Wilderness
Three rounds of co-op applications. Zero interviews. The market was not the problem — I was. My resume was outdated, my prep was shallow, and the silence was the only feedback I needed.
The wilderness teaches you one thing: nothing gets handed to you. So I stopped waiting. Started feeding myself — projects, skills, reps — faster than I could process. Once I started, I couldn’t stop.
“Nothing gets handed to you. Once I understood that, I stopped waiting.”
The Forge
An unpaid co-op that taught me nothing except that I wasn’t going to learn anything waiting for someone else to teach me. So I co-founded LearnFlow with Allen Varghese — an idea born from studying across five disconnected tools. First version in a weekend. The moment it worked, something shifted. I’d made something real, from nothing. I wanted that feeling again. That was the first time the hunger showed up.
That became the machine. 30+ hour weeks on top of a full course load. Startup expo, pitch competition, faculty demos. An AI platform with six integrated systems and 150+ beta users — not from a launch, but from going back with something better every time.
“I won’t pretend it started with passion. It started with needing a job. At some point I stopped being able to stop.”
The World Stage
GitHub — Click Here !With Team Relentless, we built something we believed in and threw it into one of the most competitive global hackathons in the world. Out of more than 11,500 projects submitted to the 2025 NASA Space Apps Challenge, ours was named a — placing in the top 1,290 teams worldwide and earning acknowledgment from NASA for the work.
What made it mean something was how we got there. One working weekend. An idea on Friday, a live production URL on Azure by Sunday — fully automated CI/CD pipeline, real data integrations, real users. We built AirCast — an AI-powered air quality forecasting platform pulling from NASA TEMPO satellite data, OpenAQ ground sensors, and OpenWeather APIs, generating 6-hour AQI predictions through an interactive geospatial map and a conversational AI interface. Zero to production in 48 hours.
Most people never find out if what they build can stand next to the best in the world. We found out. It can.
“Most people never find out if what they build can stand next to the best in the world. We found out. It can.”
The Arena
My first real corporate environment. They put me on a new org-wide AI initiative — a startup operating model inside a large enterprise. No traditional structure. Just build something real.
I co-built an AI analytics engine that turns fragmented security signals into prioritized action — not dashboards, reasoning. Specialized agents that understand organizational context and surface what actually matters. Then I shipped two internal AI tools that changed how the team operated: automated status updates, and a shared-intelligence layer that flags blockers without another meeting. Small tools. Real adoption.
The work reached senior leadership and got recognized for what it was. But I’m not done. I’m still in it. Still building.
“A year ago I had zero interviews. I’m not going to pretend I’m done — but I know now that I can.”
What I work with
- React
- TypeScript
- JavaScript
- Node.js
- Python
- Angular
- Redis
- PostgreSQL
- GraphQL
- REST APIs
- LangChain and agentic AI systems
- MCP tool integration
- AI agent prompt engineering
- CI/CD pipelines
- Azure
- System design
- Performance optimization
Let’s talk
If you are building something that matters and you want someone who will figure out whatever needs figuring out — I am always open to a conversation.
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