Shlok Thakkar

Software Engineer · Champaign, IL

Currently at JCAIL, Johnson Controls' AI lab in the University of Illinois Research Park, and working on the Charm++ parallel runtime at UIUC's Parallel Programming Lab.

Download PDF · Open the desktop version

Education

B.S. Computer Science + Economics

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign · 2024 - 2028

Minor in Statistics · GPA 3.91/4.00 · Expected May 2028

Coursework: Algorithms & Models of Computation (CS/ECE 374), Computer Architecture (CS 233), Data Structures, Discrete Structures, Linear Algebra, Statistical Analysis

Experience

Software Engineering Intern - Johnson Controls AI Lab (JCAIL)

Sep 2026 - Present · Research Park @ UIUC

Joined JCAIL, Johnson Controls' AI lab in the University of Illinois Research Park

Software Engineering Intern - Stealth Startup

Jun - Aug 2026 · New York, NY

Cut claim-research latency from 2-3 min to 30-40 s (~75%) by parallelizing a two-phase LLM research pipeline across 6 concurrent web-search calls
Built a serverless backend across 4 AWS Lambda functions and Aurora PostgreSQL Serverless v2, holding sub-100ms query latency and removing 4 managed services via the RDS Data API
Designed a 12-table PostgreSQL schema with pgvector (1,024-dim embeddings) and full-text search, serving hybrid retrieval through RRF fusion of cosine and BM25 in a single SQL query with no separate vector store
Shipped a durable 8-stage claim-lifecycle state machine on Inngest with typed events, per-case concurrency isolation, automatic retries, and 57 unit tests
Hardened the LLM tool layer against prompt injection, catching 112 of 113 adversarial payloads

Undergraduate Research Assistant - Parallel Programming Lab @ UIUC

Apr 2026 - Present

Implemented custom operators and broadcasting for a distributed NumPy-style array abstraction in C++ on the Charm++ parallel runtime
Redesigned 3 core runtime APIs in C++20 for Reconverse, a ground-up rewrite of the Charm++ parallel runtime

Software Developer - Disruption Lab @ UIUC

Aug 2025 - Present

Converted a read-only tool into a fully editable platform for 40+ users by building a Flask + Neo4j REST API serving real-time project-resource dependency graphs, cutting query latency 60% with optimized Cypher
Expanded automated tax-schema diff coverage from 7 to 27 states (+286%) for a Fortune 500 financial-services client by building a Python/lxml XSD parser over a 44-jurisdiction pipeline
Safeguarded data integrity ahead of downstream integration by writing 43 unit tests across XSD fixtures and business-rule mappings

Undergraduate Research Assistant - Dept. of Finance @ UIUC

May 2025 - Apr 2026

Achieved a 63% firm-level match rate at 90% precision across 10M+ records by building an NLP entity-resolution pipeline (TF-IDF, Levenshtein, fuzzy matching) over the TED and ORBIS financial databases
Cut pipeline runtime 73% (48 hrs to 13 hrs) through name normalization, deduplication, and batched text cleaning across 8 cores
Delivered matched datasets cited in 3 faculty working papers

Software Development Intern - IQM Corporation

Jun - Aug 2025 · Ahmedabad, India

Delivered AI-powered analysis to 3 internal teams serving 40+ concurrent users under a 30 s latency target by building a production FastAPI service with JWT auth and rate limiting on AWS Bedrock via LangChain, reducing P95 latency 40%

Projects

feelens - Stripe fee intelligence dashboard

Next.js 16 · TypeScript · Tailwind 4 · Supabase · Anthropic API · Recharts · live demo

Zero to one full-stack: 24 React components, 8 App Router API routes, Supabase Postgres with row-level security, public demo mode requiring no credentials
Surfaces the 0.3-0.5% most startups pay above Stripe's nominal 2.9%: Amex premiums, international surcharges, retained refund fees, and won-dispute fees
LLM fee optimizer that feeds a computed leakage breakdown into the Anthropic API for ranked recommendations with estimated monthly savings
AES-256-GCM encryption of tenant Stripe keys at rest, with Stripe accessed read-only

vibesafe - AI security review for pull requests

TypeScript · GitHub Actions · Express · PostgreSQL · Redis · NVIDIA NIM

GitHub Action that reviews PR diffs across 10 vulnerability categories and 3 severity tiers, posts a 0-100 score, and blocks merge on critical findings
Runs Llama 3.3 70B on NVIDIA NIM through the OpenAI-compatible API in enforced-JSON mode, with a repair pass that drops findings the model got wrong
3-package TypeScript monorepo: action, Express/PostgreSQL/Redis API, shared types, 27 unit tests
YAML-configurable severity thresholds, ignore paths, skipped categories, and custom rules

cartel - Shared-cart payments agent (Ramp Builders Cup finalist)

Next.js 16 · React 19 · Supabase · OpenAI API · Zod · Vitest · PWA · live demo

Finalist at a one-day NYC hackathon on the theme save money, save time, with a 4-person team
Deterministic largest-remainder split engine allocating every line-item cent exactly, with no LLM anywhere on the money path
Agentic cart builder turning free text into a priced multi-vendor cart, where the LLM never sees a vendor price and never writes a number
Compiles each roommate's rule sentences into structured policies, then routes flagged lines for live approval on the owner's phone before any card is charged
Mobile-first installable PWA over 23 App Router API routes, 10 Postgres migrations, and 81 Vitest cases, demoed across two devices on a local hotspot

scroll-royale - 1v1 competitive scrolling iOS app

SwiftUI · Combine · AVKit · Supabase · PostgreSQL · demo video

Built end to end in 30 hours at HackIllinois 2026 across 31 Swift source files, including a custom design system
10-table Supabase Postgres schema with row-level security, 15 RPC functions, and 5 SQL migrations
Near-real-time score sync via batched telemetry writes, adaptive polling, and a TTL cache with stale-while-revalidate

raft-kv - Distributed key-value store

Go · net/rpc · zero dependencies

Raft consensus from scratch against the paper, no consensus library: leader election, log replication, persistence, and snapshotting across a 5-node cluster
Linearizable reads routed through the log rather than the local map, with exactly-once client semantics via a dedup table
1,000+ concurrent operations under chaos testing that killed and rejoined nodes across 30-second fault windows

orderbook - Limit order book

C++20 · CMake · Catch2

Thread-safe matching engine across 5 order types with FIFO price-time priority and O(1) cancellation
Incremental level cache cutting pre-checks from O(N) to O(P), roughly 500x on a 10K-order book
O(1) microstructure queries for best bid/ask, spread, mid-price, and depth, with a 46-case Catch2 suite

blueprint-qa - AI review of construction and engineering drawings

SvelteKit · FastAPI · PostgreSQL · NVIDIA NIM · pytesseract · Docker · live demo

Upload a PDF, get flagged missing tags, dimension mismatches, and unlabeled elements
OCR via pdf2image and pytesseract feeding a Llama 3.2 11B vision model per page, with async SQLAlchemy persistence
Ships as one Docker image serving both the API and the static SPA, deployed split across Vercel and Render

whoop-local - Local-first WHOOP 5.0 client over Bluetooth LE (in progress)

Python · bleak · Bluetooth LE · GATT

Reads the band directly over BLE with no phone and no cloud in the path, which also yields live heart rate that the official cloud API cannot provide
Enumerated the 5.0's full GATT profile into a mapped service and characteristic reference, since public reverse-engineering coverage stops at the 4.0
Staged plan: decode packets and derive metrics in Python, then reimplement as a Rust daemon streaming into local SQLite

Technical Skills

languages: TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, C/C++, Go, Swift, SQL, Java
ai/agents: agentic workflows, tool calling, Anthropic API, OpenAI API, NVIDIA NIM, AWS Bedrock, LangChain
retrieval: pgvector, RRF fusion, BM25, full-text search, prompt-injection defense
frontend: React, Next.js, Tailwind CSS, shadcn/ui, SvelteKit, SwiftUI, Framer Motion
backend: FastAPI, Flask, Express, Node.js, REST APIs, microservices, caching
databases: PostgreSQL, Aurora, Supabase, Redis, Neo4j, Inngest
distributed: Raft consensus, Charm++, concurrency, low-latency services, large-scale data pipelines
cloud: AWS (Lambda, Aurora, Bedrock, EC2, S3), Terraform, Docker, Vercel
tooling: Git, GitHub Actions, CI/CD, Vitest, Catch2, pytest, CMake