San Francisco / Software Engineer at Fermat

I build production systems end to end, with agentic AI at the core of how I design, ship, and review. At Fermat, that shows up as AI-enabled agentic commerce running live for brands like Backcountry and GNC.

UIUC MCS /Fermat /ex-Relativity
Portrait of Aditya Ashok
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01 /

Five companies. Three degrees. One throughline.

My outlook on my career, and life in general, started with a simple jigsaw puzzle.

When I was young, finishing a puzzle meant my uncle would buy me a new one. The Mona Lisa. The Sydney Opera House. The Golden Gate Bridge. Not just puzzles, but my first glimpses of the world's masterpieces, earned piece by piece. What began as a hobby turned into something more. I started timing myself. 50 pieces became 100, then 500, 1,000, 3,000. When 2D lost its edge, I moved to 3D. When standard Sudokus became routine, I sought out expert variants with new and intricate constraints.

The pattern was clear. I wasn't solving puzzles to finish them. I was solving them because I couldn't help myself.

That drive led me to computer science. Not because I dreamed of becoming the next Steve Jobs, but because I picked up the subject in Grade 11 out of pure curiosity and found something revelatory. Beneath all the syntax, frameworks, and technologies, there was one constant: problem-solving. That singular thread had defined every choice I'd made before, and would define every choice after.

I don't solve problems because an assignment requires it or because work expects it. I solve them as a way of living. I've built automated apps to split monthly phone bills with friends on my family plan, and dashboards to track my weekly poker analytics. I wake up to the NYT Games and LinkedIn puzzles each morning. I even built my own Wordle clone that pulls random five-letter words from a dictionary, not because anyone asked, but because the idea wouldn't leave me alone.

02 /

Where the work has actually shipped.

  1. Fermat

    01
    2026 to Present
    Software Engineer · San Francisco · Remote

    AI-enabled agentic commerce platform powering funnels, storefronts, and product pages for Backcountry, Scotts Miracle-Gro, New Era, and GNC.

    • Ship full-stack across the storefront, dashboard, agent runtime, and data pipelines, with agentic AI woven into the build and review loop.
    • Owned end-to-end delivery of the statistical significance engine for experiments, used by CRO teams at Backcountry and New Era to call experiment outcomes.
    • Built a prefilled-cart URL system letting brands collapse multi-step browsing into one-click checkout from ad and influencer campaigns.
    • Led a server-side lead-capture integration with Attentive for Scotts Miracle-Gro, owning the spec, customer requirements, and cross-team delivery.
    React TypeScript Python Go SQL/dbt Cube.js Playwright PostHog
  2. Relativity

    02
    2025
    Software Engineering Intern, Data Platform · Chicago, IL

    Legal tech platform managing 70+ PB of customer data on Azure. I worked on the storage and data platform team driving cloud cost reduction.

    • Built an ML-driven data re-tiering system that cut $1.8M annually from cloud storage across the platform.
    • Classification models on file access patterns predicted optimal hot, cool, and cold tier placement via Azure AutoML.
    • Shipped end-to-end ETL with Azure SDK V2 and DuckDB, wired into CI/CD through GitHub Actions.
    Python Azure ML DuckDB ETL GitHub Actions
  3. ECODE Lab at MSU

    03
    2023 to 2024
    Research Software Developer · East Lansing, MI

    Evolution-inspired algorithms for eco-evolutionary theory research.

    • Cut core algorithm runtime 40% by swapping in custom data structures (Fibonacci heaps) for priority queues.
    • Published two open-source libraries in Python and C++, including a high-performance priority queue on PyPI used by evolutionary researchers.
    • Implemented PageRank and Markov-chain models for simulating evolutionary dynamics at scale.
    Python C++ Algorithms Open Source Research
  4. AssetMark

    04
    2023
    Software Engineering Intern · Concord, CA

    Fintech platform serving independent financial advisors.

    • Architected end-to-end data pipelines in Python and C# for a core platform overhaul.
    • Docker-containerized automation generating PostgreSQL schemas from Avro, wired into event-driven pub-sub.
    • Stood up a BDD test suite (Gherkin + Cucumber + Playwright) and resolved 5+ blockers gating deployment.
    Python C# PostgreSQL Docker Playwright BDD
  5. Trane Technologies

    05
    2021
    Data Science Intern · Davidson, NC

    Global HVAC manufacturer making $1M+ annual procurement decisions.

    • Built an ML forecasting system predicting raw-material indices four quarters ahead with 90% accuracy, directly informing seven-figure procurement calls.
    • Integrated real-time Bloomberg market data into PostgreSQL; optimized schemas for model inference.
    • Designed a supplier management database that cut task time from 10+ minutes to under a minute.
    Python scikit-learn PostgreSQL ETL Forecasting
03 /

Things I built because they needed to exist.

01 Graduate Research · 2025

CourseQA

RAG chatbot for course-specific Q&A.

Benchmarked FAISS vs Qdrant across Zephyr, Mistral, LLaMA-2, and Gemma embeddings to deliver high-accuracy, context-aware answers on academic content.

RAG LLMs FAISS Qdrant Python
Code
02 Graduate Research · 2025

AI Career Companion

HCI-driven GenAI career support.

Context-aware resume critique, skill-gap analysis, and prompt-engineered LLM feedback loops, built as a user-centered interactive assistant.

GenAI HCI Prompt Engineering Python
Code
03 Published · 2024

Published Research Libraries

Open-source algorithms for digital ecology.

Two Python and C++ libraries from ECODE Lab, including a high-performance priority queue on PyPI used by evolutionary researchers for simulation work.

Python C++ PyPI Algorithms
PyPI
04 Graduate Coursework · 2025

MyCO

Cloud-native database application.

Advanced SQL, indexing, triggers, and constraints layered over CloudSQL on GCP. A deep study in production DBMS design patterns.

GCP CloudSQL SQL DBMS
Academic, source on request
05 Undergrad Capstone · 2022

Microsoft ASL Translator

Browser extension for STEM ASL translation.

Word2vec + BERT NLP models powering a Chrome extension that translates web text into American Sign Language, focused on STEM terminology accessibility.

NLP BERT word2vec Flask JavaScript
Industry partner, closed source
06 Industry Collaboration · 2022

Kellogg's Customer Insights

Multilingual sentiment and classification NLP.

Production-deployed translation tool processing 10,000+ multilingual comments, plus sentiment models and multi-label classifiers built in R and Python.

NLP R Python Sentiment
Industry partner, closed source
04 /

Grounded in theory and research.

01 Aug 2024 to Dec 2025

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

  • Master of Computer Science
GPA
3.95 / 4.0
Focus
ML Systems and Data Management
Relevant Coursework
Advanced Data Management User-Centered ML ML for Software Engineering Text Information Systems Artificial Intelligence Data Mining Bioinformatics
02 Aug 2019 to Dec 2022

Michigan State University

Honors College
  • B.S. Computer Science and Engineering
  • B.S. Data Science
GPA
3.72 / 4.0
Minors
  • Business
  • Entrepreneurship and Innovation
Relevant Coursework
Big Data Analysis Algorithm Engineering Artificial Intelligence Bioinformatics & Pattern Recognition Object-Oriented Software Design Optimization Methods in Data Science Data Structures & Algorithms
05 /

Lessons are meant to be shared.

The engineers, mentors, and managers who poured into me early are the reason I move the way I do today. I have been lucky to learn from people who treated their own experience as something to hand forward, not hold onto.

That belief runs through everything outside of the code for me. I led residential communities of more than 1,200 students as an RA at MSU, and coached over 1,000 peers on their careers and job searches. Mentorship is not a side project. It is how I try to pay forward the guidance I have been given.

In every room I step into, I look for people to learn from and people I can lift up. The quotes above stuck with me years ago, and they still set the bar.

06 /

Off the clock.

Behind the decks 01

Behind the decks

I DJ whenever I get the chance. House, hip-hop, Bollywood. There is a version of the flow state you only find when you are reading a room in real time.

On two wheels 02

On two wheels

Long stretches of open road on my motorcycle are how I reset. Illinois, Michigan, California, anywhere the route looks interesting on a map.

On and off the field 03

On and off the field

I play, watch, and follow sports obsessively. Football, cricket, F1, basketball. The competitive rhythm of teams and seasons is its own kind of storytelling.

07 /

Let's find a reason to talk.

If something I have built, written, or ridden past catches your eye, I would love to hear from you.

A project you want a second set of hands on, a DJ set at your next event, an early morning ride through the Bay, or just a hello from someone passing through. Whatever the reason, the door is open.

Send a note