RS

Software engineer building full-stack & AI things that help people.

Nepal → Denison University (CS + Math) → wherever the interesting problems are

résumé
01

About

I grew up in Nepal and came to Denison University to study Computer Science and Mathematics. Somewhere between my first robot (it danced, sort of) and my first production LLM system, building software went from a major to a habit I can't put down.

Last summer I interned at TransCore, where my team built an AI customer-service chatbot built on open-source LLMs hosted locally for privacy, RAG to keep answers honest, and guardrails to keep prompt injections out. As a Breakthrough Tech AI fellow at Cornell Tech, I worked with Nestlé on predicting flavor trends from 14 million Amazon reviews.

When I'm not coding, I'm probably organizing a Nepali cultural event on campus. I chair cultural events for the Nepalese Student Association, which is my favorite way of bringing a piece of home to Ohio.

Ritika Shrestha
from:
Kathmandu, Nepal
studied:
CS + Math @ Denison
gpa:
3.79, Dean's List every year
favorite bug:
the Bluetooth one that took 3 weeks
02

Projects

no. 01 ★

TransCore AI Support Chatbot

An AI customer-service chatbot for toll processing, built during my TransCore internship, running locally hosted open-source LLMs with LoRA fine-tuning, RAG over live company docs, and prompt-injection guardrails.

  • LLMs
  • RAG
  • Ollama
  • LoRA
open the case study →
no. 02 ★

Blueberry Mart

The digital infrastructure for a multi-branch grocery mart launching in Nepal: a React Native customer app, a React back-office portal, and an event-driven .NET 8 backend on Cloud Run with Kafka streaming into BigQuery.

  • .NET 8
  • React Native
  • Kafka
  • BigQuery
open the case study →
no. 03 ★

Little AI Helper

A published Chrome extension that autofills job applications, generates tailored answers and cover letters from your resume, and flags visa-sponsorship requirements, powered by Gemini and a Cloud Run to Vertex AI proxy.

  • TypeScript
  • React
  • Vite
  • Manifest V3
open the case study →
no. 04 ★

Jobbie

A job-posting platform helping students find internships. Five C#/.NET 8 microservices communicating over gRPC, HTTP, and Kafka, containerized with Docker and deployed on Azure Kubernetes.

  • C#
  • .NET 8
  • gRPC
  • Kafka
open the case study →
no. 05 ★

Flavor Radar (Nestlé)

A sentiment-driven flavor trend predictor analyzing 14M Amazon reviews with RoBERTa and TF-IDF, ranking emerging trends to guide data-driven R&D.

  • Python
  • RoBERTa
  • NLP
  • Logistic Regression
open the case study →
no. 06 ★

Branch

A plant-focused social app with smart watering reminders, using TensorFlow image classification for plant ID and Arduino humidity sensors feeding real-time soil data.

  • Django
  • React Native
  • TensorFlow
  • AWS
open the case study →
no. 07

Style Board

A Next.js social shopping app to browse clothing, discover outfit inspiration, and shop the exact products people post.

  • Next.js
  • MongoDB
  • Tailwind
  • TypeScript
open the case study →
no. 08

Dancing Robot

An Arduino-powered robot that walks and dances, coordinating multiple sensors and servo motors with embedded C++.

  • Arduino
  • C++
  • Robotics
  • Sensors
open the case study →
← scroll sideways · click any card for the full story
03

Experience

  1. Apr 2026 - Present

    Handshake AI Fellow · Handshake

    • Ship agentic coding projects end-to-end from natural-language specs, owning a 5-phase GitHub workflow to scope tasks, write evaluation rubrics, and benchmark 4 frontier models against them
    • AI
    • LLMs
    • Agentic Coding
    • Evals
    • GitHub

  2. May 2025 - May 2026

    AI/ML Fellow · Breakthrough Tech AI · Cornell Tech

    • Selected for a competitive AI fellowship combining machine learning coursework with Cornell faculty, an industry AI Studio project, and mentorship from working ML practitioners
    • Machine Learning
    • AI
    • NLP

  3. Jun 2025 - Aug 2025

    Software Engineering Intern · TransCore

    • Shipped a RAG chatbot that automated FAQ and toll-processing inquiries for customer service reps, hosting quantized Llama 3.2 Vision, Mistral, and Qwen locally via Ollama to keep customer data in-house within GPU memory limits
    • Applied LoRA fine-tuning for tone-aware, de-escalating responses and built security guardrails, including input sanitization and semantic routing to block prompt injection before it reached the model
    ↑ full case study up in projects
    • RAG
    • Ollama
    • LoRA
    • LLMs
    • Python

  4. Dec 2024 - May 2025

    Software Engineering Intern · Real AI Dynamics (RAID)

    • Built a collaborative-filtering recommendation service for micro-SaaS platforms, serving personalized recommendations across 10 products
    • Co-hosted AI workshops as an educator, creating technical content and delivering presentations to non-specialist audiences
    • AI
    • Recommender Systems
    • Python

  5. Nov 2022 - May 2026

    Junior Software Engineer · Denison IT Web Services

    • Built a customizable app dashboard for the university's internal portal using Vue.js inside Drupal Twig, with drag-and-drop layouts, filtering, and saved per-user preferences; Google Analytics showed a 25% increase in engagement
    • Automated the build and deployment workflow in GitLab CI/CD and resolved production support tickets across 4 years on the team
    • Vue.js
    • Drupal
    • PHP
    • CI/CD
    • GitLab

  6. Jan 2024 - May 2024

    Teaching Assistant · Denison Computer Science Dept.

    • Tutored CS students through class content and assignments, and co-designed course structures with faculty, contributing to a 10% improvement in student grades
    • Teaching
    • Mentorship
View full résumé
04

Skills

Languages

  • C#
  • Python
  • TypeScript
  • JavaScript
  • C++
  • SQL
  • PHP
  • R

Frameworks

  • React Native
  • Next.js
  • Node.js
  • Django
  • .NET
  • Vue.js

Infrastructure

  • Docker
  • Kubernetes
  • Azure
  • AWS
  • CI/CD
  • gRPC
  • Kafka

AI / ML

  • TensorFlow
  • RAG
  • RoBERTa
  • Ollama
  • LLMs
05

Involvement

  1. Oct 2025 - Present

    Chair of Cultural Events · Nepalese Student Association

    • Designed and promoted a multi-faceted program featuring traditional dance, music, and cuisine, increasing campus engagement with Nepalese culture by 40% compared to prior years

  2. Oct 2022 - Present

    Member · Women in Math and Computer Science

    • Fostered inclusivity and diversity within the STEM community by actively participating in club initiatives, promoting equal representation and support for underrepresented groups in math and computer science

  3. Apr 2025 - Present

    Member · Society of Women Engineers

    • Participated in annual Society of Women Engineers conference, connecting with global engineering professionals, engaging in technical workshops, and exploring innovations across disciplines

honors & awards

  • Pi Mu EpsilonMar 2025
    Denison UniversityInternational Honor Society for Mathematics
  • Upsilon Pi EpsilonFeb 2025
    Denison UniversityHonorary Society for Computing & Information Disciplines
  • Forbes B. Wiley Award2025
    Denison Mathematics Dept.Awarded for outstanding achievement in mathematics
  • Dean's List2022 - 2026
    Denison UniversityMaintained GPA of 3.79 / 4.00 throughout degree
06

Now

A living note of what I'm actually up to right now, because a portfolio shouldn't be a museum.

07

Contact

Let's connect

Open to software engineering & AI roles. The fastest way to reach me is email, or grab my résumé below.

Emailshrest_r2@denison.eduGitHub@ritsthLinkedInRitika ShresthaRésuméDownload PDF