Open for Full-Time Roles

Software engineer building distributed systems, cloud-native platforms, and AI-powered applications.

I spent four years at Deutsche Bank building event-driven financial systems: Kafka pipelines, microservices, real-time trade verification, and full-stack trading dashboards used firm-wide. I'm now pursuing an M.S. in Computer Science at USC, where I build production AI systems spanning retrieval, semantic search, and agentic workflows. I care most about systems that are reliable under real load and correct when it matters.

Los Angeles, CA M.S. CS, USC Previously Deutsche Bank
Ria Jha

Education

Aug 2025 - Present

University of Southern California

M.S. in Computer Science
Los Angeles, CA
Coursework: Machine Learning for Data Science, Information Retrieval and Web Search Engines, Analysis of Algorithms, Database Systems, Web Technologies, Advanced Mobile Devices & Game Consoles.
Aug 2017 - Aug 2021

Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University for Women

B.Tech in Information Technology
Delhi, India
Coursework: Data Structures & Algorithms, Operating Systems, Object-Oriented Programming, Computer Architecture, Computer Networks, Discrete Mathematics, Foundations of AI, Machine Learning.

Experience

Sep 2026 - Present Los Angeles, CA (Remote)

Software Engineer Fellow

Major League Hacking
  • MLH Fellowship, G-Research track (Open Source).
  • Added system-prompt configuration to an LLM-backed application, passing standing instructions through the provider interface rather than as synthetic chat history, establishing the contract subsequent model changes built on.
  • Instrumented per-request token usage across standard and streamed responses with schema migrations and a usage endpoint, making inference cost measurable rather than estimated.
  • Indexed conversation history lookups to eliminate full-table scans, and moved the test fixture onto migrations so schema tests verify the migrations themselves rather than reading the models back.
May 2026 - Present Los Angeles, CA

Research Lab Web & Systems Developer

USC Rossier School of Education - Science of Teaching Math (STM) Lab
  • Built an idempotent Python ETL pipeline migrating 3K+ research artifacts into S3, with metadata indexed in a normalized schema for fast, traceable retrieval.
  • Engineered hybrid semantic search on a self-hosted sentence-transformers model with pgvector nearest-neighbor queries, delivering relevance at zero per-query cost and removing the need for a dedicated vector database.
  • Building an AI summarization layer that generates plain-language overviews of dense publications via a hosted LLM API, computed once on content change and cached in PostgreSQL to bound cost and latency.
Nov 2025 - Present Los Angeles, CA

Graduate Student Assistant - AI Automation Engineer

University of Southern California - Pre-College Programs
  • Architected a deterministic AI code compiler using Python and TypeScript that translates natural language requirements into modular, deployable Google Apps Script, functioning as an automated, event-driven operations hub for university programs.
  • Engineered a Context Engine (RAG) and AST validation pipeline to constrain LLM outputs against strict platform quotas, ensuring syntactically valid code generation and enabling zero-touch deployment via the Google Apps Script API.
  • Built a complete end-to-end operational ecosystem with a React frontend and a hub-and-spoke Google Sheets database, automating critical compliance workflows, dynamic roster syncing, and programmatic email pipelines for staff and students.
Mar 2024 - Jul 2025 Pune, India

Software Engineer II

Deutsche Bank - DWS Group
Asset management arm of Deutsche Bank, one of the world's largest investment managers with over $800B in AUM.
  • Architected event-driven Kafka pipelines for trade order processing across portfolios, with automated compliance checks, retry logic, and circuit breakers, removing manual audit workflows and improving production stability.
  • Engineered a real-time trade-verification system for correctness under market volatility, using WebSocket delta-streaming with HTTP failover, server-side throttling, and a pessimistic UI, giving portfolio managers on-demand revalidation of live prices before booking against production portfolios.
  • Authored API design standards and Kafka integration patterns adopted across the team as onboarding and reference documentation.
  • Established a testing baseline with JUnit 5, Mockito, and Testcontainers across Kafka consumers and Spring Boot services, reaching strong coverage and preventing production regressions.
Jul 2021 - Feb 2024 Pune, India

Software Engineer

Deutsche Bank - DWS Group
  • Built a full-stack trading dashboard with React and Spring Boot consolidating trades across desks; it became the firm-wide reconciliation system of record and significantly cut data discrepancies.
  • Developed containerized microservices with automated CI/CD pipelines, improving the team's release cadence and reducing deployment friction.
  • Refactored slow SQL queries and added strategic indexes to speed up financial report generation and reduce peak database load.
  • Partnered with desk stakeholders to translate trading workflows into reliable, maintainable backend services.
Jul 2020 - Jul 2021 Remote, India

Research Assistant

Indira Gandhi Delhi Technical University for Women
  • Co-developed the G2CW fact-checking framework (published at Springer, 2023) by integrating GRUs with attention mechanisms and benchmarking NLP models on precision, recall, and robustness.
  • Served as Research Assistant for the Artificial Intelligence course under Prof. Rishabh Kaushal, designing assignments, evaluation rubrics, and mentoring student project work.
Jun 2020 - Jul 2020 Remote, India

Technology Analyst Intern

Deutsche Bank - Risk, Finance & Treasury
  • Developed a full-stack virtual hackathon platform (Java Spring, REST APIs, MySQL) managing event workflows end-to-end, from participant registration to idea submission.
  • Designed normalized database schemas and JSON-based REST endpoints enabling real-time data exchange between frontend and backend across concurrent users.

Projects

Drive-Saver Copilot

ML, Agentic AI

Prescriptive maintenance system for industrial drives, built solo for the ABB Accelerator 2026 challenge. Trained failure-risk models on AI4I 2020 telemetry, selecting between XGBoost, LightGBM and a baseline with runs tracked in MLflow, and converted predicted risk into remaining useful life in hours. SHAP attribution identifies the driving feature, then a LangGraph agent runs counterfactual simulations over torque and speed, re-scoring each candidate through the model and returning the smallest adjustment that defers failure past the next maintenance window, emitted against a strict JSON schema. The AI4I physical failure rules run as a deterministic simulator beside the learned model, so any adjustment that trips a physical limit is rejected. A dataset quality report returns a verdict before any prediction is trusted. Shipped as a FastAPI service with a React dashboard on Cloud Run, with 126 tests across dataset, model, physics, counterfactual, agent, schema and API layers.

Python · XGBoost · LightGBM · SHAP · MLflow · LangGraph · FastAPI · React · Cloud Run

SOP Harness

LLM Agents, Evaluation

Engine that keeps a language model inside a fixed business procedure while it still converses naturally. Code owns phase, gates and permissions, and the model is restricted to reading and writing language, with per-phase context assembly controlling what it can see. Identity verification counts only fields that matched the record, tracking mismatch and absence as separate counters so repeated mismatches escalate while missing information does not. Protected records stay out of the model's context before verification, and disclosure is asserted by provenance rather than by searching the prompt. After measurement showed the same sentence classified both ways at temperature zero, the model's refusal signal was backed with a deterministic no-progress counter. Verified with 69 tests that need no model or network, plus 9 adversarial personas against live models across two model families: 9 of 9 passing, with zero pre-verification disclosures, zero illegal transitions and zero ungrounded replies.

Python · LLM Agents · State Machines · Adversarial Evaluation · pytest

Voices of Home

Multi-Agent AI

Architected a 4-agent system (Orchestrator, Cultural NLP, Dietary, Voice) on Fetch.ai's uAgents framework with an MCP server exposing a 37-entry cultural medical knowledge base across 13 languages. Built MongoDB Atlas Vector Search over Gemini embeddings for semantic cultural symptom lookup, with Gemini 2.5 Flash multimodal analysis and ElevenLabs multilingual voice synthesis for patient care.

Fetch.ai uAgents · MCP · MongoDB Atlas Vector · Gemini 2.5 Flash · ElevenLabs · Python

LiveCue

Real-Time AI, Streaming

Real-time AI meeting copilot that listens to the microphone and surfaces three contextual suggestions every 30 seconds (questions to ask, facts to check, talking points, or answers to what was just raised). Captures audio in chunked MediaRecorder blobs, sends them to Whisper Large V3 for transcription, and uses GPT-OSS 120B with token-by-token streaming via async generators for chat answers. Suggestions are classified into five distinct types with a typed JSON contract to keep the UI consistent. Runs entirely client-side with no backend, so the live demo takes your own Groq API key and keeps it in the browser.

React · TypeScript · Vite · Whisper Large V3 · GPT-OSS 120B · SSE Streaming · MediaRecorder

RAGenius

RAG, LLMs

End-to-end Retrieval-Augmented Generation pipeline with FAISS vector search, HuggingFace embeddings (all-MiniLM-L6-v2), and flan-t5 generation, exposed via 12 REST endpoints. Built an evaluation framework with Precision@K, MRR, NDCG, and faithfulness scoring, plus Scikit-learn grid search across prompt templates, temperature, and top-k for automated optimization.

Python · FAISS · HuggingFace · flan-t5 · LangChain · REST APIs · Scikit-learn

Awards & Honors

2024 Research Excellence

Springer Journal Publication

Neural Computing & Applications
Built an end-to-end ML pipeline covering data cleaning, GloVe embedding-based feature engineering, hyperparameter tuning, and reproducible evaluation. Proposed the G2CW framework, a GloVe plus GRU model for three-class check-worthiness detection trained on the complete 23K+ sentence ClaimBuster dataset, achieving 0.92 F1-score and surpassing the prior best of 0.81.
2024 Global Runner-Up

DWS Group AI Hackathon

Deutsche Bank, Global Internal Competition
Built an AI financial literacy platform combining a deterministic RL-driven engine (Pandas-TA indicators, DWS market APIs) with a conversational tutor for personalized portfolio recommendations.

Skills

Languages
Java · Python · JavaScript · TypeScript · SQL · C++
Backend
Spring Boot · FastAPI · Flask · Node.js · REST APIs
Frontend
React · Next.js · Vite · HTML/CSS · Tailwind
Data & Databases
PostgreSQL · pgvector · MySQL · Redis · MongoDB Atlas · FAISS · Pandas
Distributed Systems
Apache Kafka · Event-Driven Architecture · Microservices · WebSockets · Circuit Breakers
Cloud & DevOps
AWS (S3, App Runner, RDS) · GCP · Docker · Terraform · CI/CD
Generative AI
LLMs · RAG · Agentic AI Development · Multi-Agent Systems · LangChain · LangGraph · MCP (Model Context Protocol) · Prompt Engineering · Vector Search · Embeddings
Machine Learning
PyTorch · scikit-learn · XGBoost · LightGBM · TensorFlow · SHAP · MLflow
Testing
pytest · JUnit 5 · Mockito · Testcontainers · Integration Testing · TDD
Practices
System Design · API Design · Agile / Scrum · Code Review · Technical Writing