Ria Jha
Ria Jha
Software Engineer
Open to SWE Intern roles · Summer / Fall 2026

Software Engineer
who builds distributed
systems at scale.

Industry-experienced software engineer who has shipped production infrastructure at scale and is now deepening expertise in AI, agentic systems, and game development at USC. I care about systems that are reliable, well-designed, and built to last.

Los Angeles, CA USC · M.S. Computer Science · 2025–2027
Education

Where I studied

🎓

University of Southern California

M.S. in Computer Science
Aug 2025 - May 2027 · Los Angeles, CA
Coursework: Agentic Information Retrieval Systems · Advanced Game Design & Development · Analysis of Algorithms · Web Technologies
🏛️

Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University for Women

B.Tech in Information Technology
Aug 2017 - Aug 2021 · Delhi, India
GPA: 9.0 / 10.0
Coursework: Data Structures & Algorithms · Operating Systems · Object-Oriented Programming · Computer Architecture · Computer Networks · Discrete Mathematics · Foundations of AI · Machine Learning
Experience

Where I've worked

Software Engineer II

Deutsche Bank · DWS Group
Asset management division of Deutsche Bank, one of the world's largest investment managers with $800B+ in AUM.
Mar 2024 - Jul 2025 · Pune, India
  • Owned end-to-end development of a client-facing trade processing dashboard (React + Spring Boot microservices) processing 10K+ daily trades with 80% reduction in data discrepancies - adopted as the primary reconciliation tool across trading desks.
  • Built real-time event-driven data pipelines using Python and Kafka Streams to ingest external financial APIs with circuit breakers, retry logic, and fault-tolerant error handling, cutting production incident rate by 40%.
  • Deployed containerized microservices on Kubernetes with Vault-managed secrets and distributed tracing, achieving 85% uptime SLA across 4 services.
  • Authored technical documentation on Kafka partitioning, microservices scalability, and API design patterns - adopted as onboarding reference material across the team.

Software Engineer I

Deutsche Bank · DWS Group
Jul 2021 - Feb 2024 · Pune, India
  • Led migration of 3 legacy monoliths to containerized microservices with CI/CD pipelines, cutting deployment time from 2 weeks to 3 days across 4 production rollouts.
  • Built Kafka-based event-driven pipelines to ingest, validate, and process 5K+ daily streaming transactions with automated compliance checks, eliminating 100% of manual audit workflows.
  • Optimized PostgreSQL query plans and indexing for high-throughput data processing, reducing report generation time by 30%; owned production support including incident triage, root cause analysis, and hotfix deployments.

SDE Intern

Deutsche Bank · RFT Department
Jun 2020 - Jul 2020 · Remote, India
  • Built a full-stack web platform using React, Spring MVC, and SQL to support internal innovations and hackathons.
  • Designed RESTful APIs for user authentication, lifecycle management, and workflow orchestration.
Projects & Research

Things I've built

Distributed Systems

PopRadio

High-concurrency music streaming backend built to handle 100+ simultaneous users without race conditions. Redis distributed locking eliminates contention on shared state; NGINX load balancing enables horizontal scale-out; Redis-MongoDB write sync keeps engagement data consistent under load - the same concurrency patterns found in real-time gaming backends.

Node.jsMongoDBRedisNGINXDocker
AI / Agentic · RAG

Agentic RAG Financial Assistant

Multi-step autonomous agent that retrieves, ranks, and synthesises financial documents via FAISS vector search over 1K+ embeddings. Tool-calling pipeline handles document retrieval, API ingestion, and LLM response generation - cutting analyst lookup time from hours to minutes with grounded, low-latency outputs.

PythonLangChainFAISSPyTorchRAGEmbeddings
Published Research · Springer 2023

Check-Worthy Sentence Detection

Proposed the G2CW framework - a GloVe embedding + GRU pipeline for three-class check-worthiness detection (check-worthy, unimportant factual, non-factual). Trained on the complete 23K+ sentence ClaimBuster dataset - prior work used partial data and classical ML only - achieving 0.92 F1-score and surpassing the previous best of 0.81. Also curated IndianClaims, a novel 953-sentence dataset from Indian parliament debates, politician tweets, and PM statements. G2CW matched the strongest CNN and LSTM baselines while using the least training time (12.5 s). Published in Springer Neural Computing & Applications. Research Excellence Award 2024.

PythonGRUGloVe EmbeddingsNLPDeep LearningMulti-class Classification
Awards & Honors

Recognition

Runner Up · Global

DWS Group AI Hackathon

Deutsche Bank, Global Internal Competition
Built an AI-powered financial platform for personalised stock portfolio recommendation and optimisation, with a financial literacy module to reduce financial knowledge gaps for end users.
2024
3rd Place · 80+ Teams

Microsoft for Startups AI Hackathon

External Competition · Bureau Challenge
Designed backend architecture for a transaction fraud detection system. Built Django REST APIs with RabbitMQ message queuing and trained a Random Forest classifier with custom feature engineering.
2024
Research Excellence Award

Check-Worthy Sentence Detection

Published · Springer Neural Computing & Applications
Proposed G2CW framework (GloVe + GRU) achieving 0.92 F1-score on 23K+ claims, surpassing the prior best of 0.81. Curated the IndianClaims dataset and demonstrated cross-domain transfer. Fastest training among all competing architectures.
Award 2024 · Published 2023
Skills

What I work with

Languages

  • Python
  • Java
  • C++
  • JavaScript / TypeScript
  • SQL

Backend

  • Spring Boot
  • Node.js / Express
  • Angular
  • Django / Flask
  • REST APIs · OAuth2

Distributed Systems

  • Microservices
  • Kafka / Kafka Streams
  • Event-Driven Architecture
  • RabbitMQ
  • Redis

Mobile

  • Android (Java)
  • Retrofit 2
  • ViewPager2
  • FusedLocationProvider
  • Material Design

Cloud & DevOps

  • AWS · GCP App Engine
  • Kubernetes · Docker
  • CI/CD · Jenkins
  • NGINX
  • Distributed Tracing

Databases

  • PostgreSQL
  • MongoDB Atlas
  • MySQL
  • Redis

AI / ML

  • PyTorch · scikit-learn
  • RAG Pipelines
  • FAISS · LangChain
  • NLP · Embeddings
  • Deep Learning (GRU)

Practices

  • Data Structures & Algorithms
  • System Design
  • JUnit · Mockito
  • Git · Agile / Scrum