Joined Ed-Tech startup Juni Learning (YC W18) as a Founding Engineer and helped develop the platform, hire engineers, and manage and mentor the team as we grew over the next 4 years
My first project was to solo develop an in-house version of Replit for students to be able to code in Python, Java, C++, and more directly on our platform. This involved a massive amount of on-the-job learning with new technologies
- Developed a robust solution using XTerm, Docker + AWS ECS, Websockets, and node-pty that allowed for code editing, automated saving, containerized safe execution, file management, and a fully working interactive terminal
- Over the course of 6 months, developed a working prototype within 2 months, a beta version within 3 months, and a fully deployed scalable production version being used by thousands of students per day by month 6. I also developed a custom live dashboard that could be used to monitor and manage the container instances in realtime during these 6 months
Other Notable Solo Projects:
- Created a Live Classes Dashboard for Ops that used the Zoom Developer API to monitor all ongoing classes, attendees, start times, and statuses in real time
- Developed a Recording Studio using WebRTC and a publishing space (Juniverse) for students to be able to share their projects. This included screen recording, overlaying an inset speaker view from the webcam, controls for choosing camera and microphone, a framework that would stream the live-recorded video to S3 in chunks, and a solution that allowed students to publish the video along with a additional post descriptions to a public site called Juniverse
- Developed an in-house version of Slack/Discord build on top of PubNub called Juni Clubs, which allowed students and instructors to build online groups for shared interests. Included live content filtering, responsive messaging and channel creation, notifications, and more
- Various data science investigations using Snowflake over the last 2 years
AI/ML Projects:
- Worked on the initial versions of Acely, an LLM-powered product to help students with SAT test prep. Using a chat interface, a student could take a practice exam, have it graded, and then get a new set of custom-generated questions to help them on areas needing improvement. Developed a production-ready pipeline that streamed live text from LLM APIs (ChatGPT, Claude), provided relevant context from chat history and course information, etc.
- Solo-Developed a prototype of an AI powered coding tutor product called Playground. It would present bespoke coding problems for the student in a live code editor, with skeleton code and helpful comments, and guide the student (with hints, tips to fix bugs, etc) towards the solution via chat interface. Also included an AI-powered course generation tool that allowed an admin to use a small prompt to create an entire syllabus in minutes
Leadership:
- Helped recruit, interview, and hire every engineer that joined the team over the next 4+ years
- Served as Team Lead, mentor, project manager, and many other roles during my time there as a founding engineer. Played a core leadership role in developing engineering best practices, documentation, and culture
- Responsible for everything from full-stack development, DB and data pipeline management (MongoDB, Snowflake), Infrastructure management (AWS, Vercel, Github Actions, Docker, etc), testing, monitoring (Sentry, custom monitoring solutions), and more

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Samvaran Sharma

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