portfolio / AI Engineer

Hi, I'm Sai Sathwik Banala

AI Engineer focused on building production-ready AI systems across Voice AI, RAG, agentic workflows, memory infrastructure, evaluations, and LLM-powered applications.

About

I enjoy combining AI with backend engineering to build reliable retrieval pipelines, orchestration systems, observability, and scalable APIs, with a strong interest in improving latency, retrieval quality, and overall system reliability.

Experience

Jul. 2026 - Sep. 2026

100xDevs

Growth Engineer – Super 30

• Worked on post-purchase funnel optimization, focusing on learner activation, engagement, cohort retention, and reducing course drop-offs. • Contributed to improving course completion from 5% to 20% (4x lift) over 2–3 months, a 15 percentage-point increase through learner engagement and retention initiatives

2025 – May. 2026

Balacx

Co-Founder

Co-founded an ad-sponsored bottled water venture inspired by FreeWater, developing a two-sided business model where advertisers fund free drinking water distribution through branded packaging. • Evaluated unit economics and commercial viability, analyzing manufacturing, logistics, advertiser pricing, and minimum order quantities; identified thin contribution margins and advertiser acquisition challenges

Jul 2025 - May 2026

unikodex

Software Developer -Intern

Led a team of interns in building a RAG pipeline for searching companies’ internal documents. Designed and optimized the document ingestion and retrieval workflow, reducing retrieval latency from approximately 4–5 seconds to around 200 milliseconds while improving access to relevant internal knowledge.

  • RAG
  • Vector Search
  • Python
  • LLMs
  • Performance Optimization
  • Team Leadership
oct 2023 - Dec 2023

Codegnan IT Solutions

Full Stack Developer -Intern

Contributed to the development of an EdTech platform using TypeScript and React. Built reusable user-interface components, integrated frontend features with backend APIs, resolved functional and UI issues, and collaborated with the development team to deliver and improve product features.

  • Typescript
  • React
  • REST APIs

Skills

  • AI Agents
  • RAG
  • Hybrid Retrieval
  • LLM Evaluation
  • FAISS
  • Voice Agents

Selected projects

Wellness Companion – Real-Time Voice AI

Built a real-time conversational voice agent using LiveKit Agents, streaming STT, VAD, LLMs, and TTS; implemented interruption handling, acoustic/textual state classification, and state-aware response strategies. • Reduced measured voice-response latency from 7–8 s to 3–3.5 s by optimizing turn detection and classifier initialization; built per-turn observability for latency attribution and asynchronous event ownership.

  • Python
  • LiveKit
  • FastAPI
  • React

MemInfra

Built a reusable AI memory infrastructure layer that enables LLM applications to extract, store, update, and retrieve long-term user and conversation knowledge. The system supports semantic and episodic memories, deterministic deduplication and supersession, hybrid lexical + vector retrieval, importance/recency-aware ranking, conversation summaries, and per-user memory isolation. Designed the memory lifecycle from LLM-based extraction through policy-driven validation and persistence, with FAISS-based semantic search and evaluation tooling to measure retrieval quality across memory benchmarks.

  • Python
  • PostgreSQL
  • SQLAlchemy
  • FAISS
  • BM25
  • OpenAI SDK

Whyline

Built an enterprise agentic AI platform that combines LLM reasoning with deterministic validation for reliable workflow automation. Implemented tool orchestration, DAG execution, evidence-grounded reasoning, RAG, evals, observability, provenance, execution budgets, and governed actions with human approval.

  • Python
  • FastAPI
  • PostgreSQL
  • SQLAlchemy
  • OpenAI-compatible LLM APIs
  • RAG
  • BM25
  • Vector Search
  • FAISS
  • DAG Orchestration
  • OpenTelemetry
  • Grafana
  • React
  • TypeScript
  • REST APIs
  • GitHub API
  • Jira API

perps-trading

Built a perpetual futures exchange backend with a deterministic matching engine supporting limit/market orders, leveraged long/short positions, margin management, fills, liquidation-price calculation, and real-time order-book updates. Designed an event-driven architecture using Redis Streams, REST APIs, WebSockets, and Binance market-price feeds.

  • Node.js
  • TypeScript
  • Redis Streams
  • WebSockets
  • REST APIs
  • Binance Futures WebSocket API
  • React
  • Next.js