Raj Bhanushali

About

Hey there! After taking a three month sabbatical from work to solo-backpack across Europe, I'm back home in Austin, TX. I'm looking for my next technical role and working on myself mentally and physically with the time I have (see now for more).

I’m a software engineer with a focus on machine learning and scalable systems. I've got experience across the full development cycle, from building high-traffic APIs at Amazon to leading product development and real-time AI analytics at a sports tech startup. I enjoy identifying problems, understanding user needs, and turning ideas into deployed, production-ready systems. My background spans backend services, cloud infrastructure, data pipelines, and applied machine learning in fast-paced environments.

Outside of work, I’m usually training in the gym, watching sports (OKC Thunder / SF 49ers), or diving into whatever random topic catches my curiosity on ChatGPT.

Work Experience

• Cerebro Sports

  Website

  Director of Product / ML; May 2024 - Mar 2025

  
  

  • Built an MVP of Cerebro's new web portal using Python and Streamlit, adding data visualizations, search capabilities, and AI analysis features. Pitched to sports industry professionals at 2024 NBA Summer League.
  • Created the company's cloud infrastructure after a partnership with Google Cloud, and implemented various LLM cascading, prompt optimization, RAG, and agentic workflows on top of Google Vertex to power CerebroAI
  • Scaled the tech team from 2 to 10 engineers, overseeing development of internal tools, mobile apps, and more. Implemented Mixpanel analytics for all products to measure success.

  Main tools: Python, NumPy/Pandas, FastAPI, SQL, Next.js, Google Cloud, Langchain/Langgraph, Bubble

• Amazon

  Team

  Software Development Engineer; December 2023 - Mar 2024

  
  
  • Worked on backend services for external Amazon APIs receiving millions of requests, building on top of AWS Fargate, API Gateway, Lambda, CloudWatch, S3 and more to scale and improve reliability.
  • Redesigned legacy Java services to improve code modularity and maintainability, adding tests and significantly improving deployment times by minutes.
  • Built end-to-end metrics using Amplitude for one of the fastest growing internal company AI tools, delivering insights on user queries, LLM performance, and more.

  Main tools: Java, Python, Git, Brazil, AWS Fargate, EC2, API Gateway, Lambda, CloudWatch, DynamoDB, React, SQL

• Tesla

  Software Engineering Intern; Feb 2023 - May 2023

  
  
  • Refined PyTorch computer vision models (custom-trained convolutional neural network) to assess collision severity and estimate repair costs.
  • Coordinated with internal teams to label 1000s of images to train and evaluate models, using data annotation platforms to speed up the labeling process.
  • Developed an ETL pipeline integrating with AWS Redshift to ingest and refine data used to train a PyTorch NLP classification model, enabling continuous model training from user data and ~2% improvement in model accuracy week over week.

  Main tools: Python, PyTorch, Apache Airflow, Scikit-learn, AWS Redshift, Docker, Kubernetes, Hugging Face

Writing

• What I Learned After 3 Months of Solo-Backpacking In Europe

  A reflection on leaving my job and my comfort zone, and learnings from my recent travels.

• It's just a "ChatGPT Wrapper"

  Why “GPT wrapper” undersells the engineering behind real products.

Now

After returning from my 3-month trip, I'm back home with family in Austin, TX. It's been great to establish a routine of eating healthy, working out, learning, and spending time with family.

I'm currently working on a project that simplifies investing across various asset classes and promotes diversification, by combining AI and traditional financial analysis to simplify finding and choosing investments. Right now, I'm building a data collection pipeline that aggregates a stock's fundamentals, price action, news, and analyst ratings, and uses that data to generate a score and recommendation in alignment with the user's investment preferences.

I'm also hard at work on gaining back the 15 pounds I lost during my trip. I've been doing a lot of strength training (PPL + Shoulders/Arms) and eating healthy, and I'm feeling great. Incorporating days of running, caffeine breaks, music breaks, and more stretching has done wonders for my body and mind.

Other things:

• Reading: "Total Recall" by Arnold Schwarzenegger, "Mastering AI: A Survival Guide to our Superpowered Future" by Jeremy Kahn.
• Learning more about music production and Ableton Live 🎵
• Working on a new skateboard deck painting project that I've been meaning to finish for a while