11 years · Principal AI Architect · shipping AI into production
Hi. I’m Shashank.
I make organizations ship with AI.
As Principal AI Architect at Taazaa I report to the CTO and own the full arc — the strategy, the prompt architectures, the agent harnesses and custom hooks for Claude Code / Copilot / Cursor, the guardrails and AIBOM, and the sessions that turn every engineer into an AI-native one. I sit on AI governance, I write the playbooks, and I ship the internal platforms the org runs on.
Delivering enterprise solutions with AI is my jam. On nights and weekends I ship the platforms — 5 production LLM systems, including an 11-agent K8s root-cause swarm, a 35+ agent meeting-intelligence SaaS on EKS, and an AI governance platform with 394 test files.
12 years across UK banking, DACH HRMS, luxury e-commerce, and US field operations. I earn the room’s trust in the morning and ship into their VPC by evening. — Get busy building, or get busy shipping.
What I do
Principal AI Architect @ Taazaa · reporting to CTO
Delivering enterprise solutions with AI is my jam.
I report to the CTO and own AI strategy and adoption for the entire engineering organization. Advisory, prompt engineering, governance, enablement, and the internal platforms that compound across every engagement. The personal projects below are what I build on nights and weekends.
01AI Advisory & Strategy
Report directly to the CTO. Advise the org on where, how, and whether to use AI — from model selection to build-vs-buy to compliance posture.
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AI Advisory & Strategy
Report directly to the CTO. Advise the org on where, how, and whether to use AI — from model selection to build-vs-buy to compliance posture.
- ▸Set the org-wide AI strategy and adoption roadmap
- ▸Author the AI-SDLC playbook adopted as the delivery baseline
- ▸Advise CEO/CTO on AI product incubation
- ▸Authored the 65-project portfolio strategy adopted by Engineering Core
02Prompt Engineering & Agentic SDLC
Delivering enterprise solutions with AI is my jam. I design the prompt architectures, agent harnesses, and custom hooks that make AI-assisted delivery reliable enough for production.
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Prompt Engineering & Agentic SDLC
Delivering enterprise solutions with AI is my jam. I design the prompt architectures, agent harnesses, and custom hooks that make AI-assisted delivery reliable enough for production.
- ▸Design prompt architectures and evaluation harnesses
- ▸Build custom agent harnesses and hooks for Claude Code, Copilot, Cursor, Jules
- ▸Roll out agentic development across every team with per-team measurement
- ▸Track adoption %, cycle-time delta, and PR throughput
03AI Governance & Guardrails
I sit on the AI governance side too — writing the policies, guardrails, and review processes that keep AI usage safe, compliant, and auditable.
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AI Governance & Guardrails
I sit on the AI governance side too — writing the policies, guardrails, and review processes that keep AI usage safe, compliant, and auditable.
- ▸Author AI usage policies and guardrails
- ▸Build AIBOM and audit-trail practices (EU AI Act aligned)
- ▸Define OPA policies, KMS encryption, SSO/RBAC patterns for AI systems
- ▸Review and approve AI features for production
04Teaching & Enablement
I run the sessions that get engineers productive with AI — Cloud, GitHub Copilot, prompt engineering, building AI workflows. I've built internal sites and curricula around all of it.
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Teaching & Enablement
I run the sessions that get engineers productive with AI — Cloud, GitHub Copilot, prompt engineering, building AI workflows. I've built internal sites and curricula around all of it.
- ▸Deliver sessions on Cloud, GitHub Copilot, and prompt engineering
- ▸Build internal teaching websites on Copilot, prompting, and AI workflows
- ▸Author how-to-build-AI-workflows and custom-harness guides
- ▸Mentor 12-member team on AI-native delivery
05Internal AI Platforms
I build the internal platforms the org runs on — the AI-usage analytics, the SaaS accelerator, the meeting intelligence, the tools that compound across every engagement.
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Internal AI Platforms
I build the internal platforms the org runs on — the AI-usage analytics, the SaaS accelerator, the meeting intelligence, the tools that compound across every engagement.
- ▸Built multi-IDE AI-usage analytics (VS Code + IntelliJ + Cursor) — coverage LinearB/DX/Faros don't ship
- ▸Architected 'cross-cutting' — 16-module Spring Boot SaaS accelerator, 264+ tests, 4 SDKs
- ▸Deployed meeting intelligence (Spreix), drawing tools, transcription pipelines org-wide
- ▸Cut SaaS engagement bootstrap from ~8 weeks to days
06Incubation & Product
I incubate products from zero to production grade — the 5 crown jewels below all started as internal bets I championed, architected, and shipped.
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Incubation & Product
I incubate products from zero to production grade — the 5 crown jewels below all started as internal bets I championed, architected, and shipped.
- ▸Incubated 5 products to production grade (see Projects below)
- ▸Authored the portfolio strategy that prioritized them
- ▸Own the build-vs-buy-vs-incubate decision for AI capabilities
- ▸Run POCs, pilots, and technology evaluations for new bets
Skills
by layerLanguages
AI / LLM Engineering
Cloud & Platform
Backend & Data
Frontend
Projects
7 featured · 1163+ commits · 59 total5 crown jewels (Tier 1) — shipped or near-shipped with defensible differentiation. The full 59-project archive lives on GitHub.
Experience
5 companies · 11 years2024 – Present
CurrentPrincipal Architect — AI (reporting to CTO)
Taazaa Inc · Noida, India
Organization-wide AI transformation for a US software-product engineering firm
- ▸Own AI strategy and adoption for the entire engineering organization, reporting directly to the CTO — playbooks, standards, tooling, and measurement for AI-assisted delivery.
- ▸Drove agentic-development rollout (Claude Code, GitHub Copilot, Cursor, autonomous agents like Jules) with per-team measurement of adoption, cycle-time delta, and PR throughput.
- ▸Built the org's AI-usage analytics platform covering VS Code, IntelliJ AND Cursor — multi-IDE telemetry that commercial tools (LinearB, DX, Faros) don't offer — giving leadership per-team AI adoption, acceptance-rate, and impact data.
- ▸Architected 'cross-cutting', a Spring Boot auto-configuration library: 16 production modules (multi-tenancy, RBAC, audit, pgmq queue, pgvector search, payments, LiteLLM AI gateway), 264+ tests, SDKs in React/Node/Python/Java — cuts SaaS engagement bootstrap from ~8 weeks to days.
- ▸Authored the AI-SDLC playbook and engineering standards adopted as the org-wide delivery baseline. Advise CEO/CTO on AI product incubation; authored the 65-project portfolio strategy adopted by the Engineering Core; incubated 5 products to production grade.
07/2021 – 2024
Technical Specialist / Technical Architect
Coforge Ltd · Noida, India
Umantis (Haufe Group) — multi-tenant talent-management SaaS for the DACH enterprise market
- ▸Architected and evolved a multi-tenant HRMS SaaS serving enterprise customers across Germany, Austria, Switzerland — Java 17 microservices on AWS EKS.
- ▸Led a 12-member engineering team across design reviews, code review culture, POC evaluation, and mentoring.
- ▸Owned platform architecture: gRPC + Eureka + circuit breakers, Kafka & ActiveMQ messaging, Elasticsearch search, MySQL/PostgreSQL with Flyway migrations, Redis caching, full AWS estate (Lambda, SQS/SNS, API Gateway, CloudWatch, X-Ray).
- ▸Implemented security & GDPR-compliance practices for multi-tenant data isolation across DACH enterprise customers.
08/2019 – 06/2021
Senior Software Engineer
AKQA · Gurgaon, India
E-commerce platforms for Richemont luxury brands: Panerai, Montblanc, Van Cleef & Arpels
- ▸Client-facing engineer for 3 Richemont luxury maisons — owned architecture decisions and presented directly to brand-side stakeholders under exacting luxury-retail standards.
- ▸Delivered the Panerai global e-commerce platform (16-month program): AEM (OSGi/Sling/JCR) + Java 8 microservices + AWS, with personalization, payment, and inventory integrations.
05/2016 – 08/2019
Application Developer
IBM India · Noida, India
IBM US/Canada Parts Administration — ERP for field operations
- ▸Built the real-time flagging system used daily by IBM field engineers across US/Canada parts operations — cut reporting from batch cycles to real-time, automated turnaround-time calculation, and surfaced cost-loss patterns.
09/2014 – 05/2016
System Engineer
Tata Consultancy Services · India
Lloyds Bank (UK)
- ▸Java developer on regulated UK retail-banking systems (19-month engagement) — first exposure to compliance-grade delivery.
Photography
beyond codePhotography taught me systems thinking. Light, composition, timing — architecture exists everywhere. The same eye that frames a shot frames a system. A growing collection, updated as the archive grows past a hundred frames.
Equipment
- Cameras: Sony A7IV, Sony A7RIII
- Lenses: Sony 24-70mm f/2.8 GM, Sony 85mm f/1.4 GM, Sony 35mm f/1.4 GM
- Drone: DJI Mavic 3
- Accessories: Peak Design Carbon Tripod, ProGrade Digital CFexpress Type A
Credentials & Contact
Certifications
- AWS Certified Solutions Architect — Associate
Education
B.Tech — Mechanical Engineering
Hindustan College of Science and Technology · 2014
Visa: Employment visa (sponsorship) — UAE Golden Visa eligible via AI-specialist route. Languages: English (fluent), Hindi (native). Nationality: Indian.