Punya Shah
Software Engineer · Los Angeles, CA
- University of Southern California
- M.S. Computer Science
- Pennsylvania State University
- B.S. Computer Science, Minor in Math
I am doing my master's in CS at USC and work in the Interaction Lab, building the pipeline behind a model that measures how two people's language aligns over a conversation.
Before this I spent a little over two years at Amazon as an SDE on fulfillment infrastructure, working on the Tier-1 services behind sortation and logistics placement. Before Amazon I was at Penn State finishing my CS degree, where I interned at Amazon one summer and spent a couple of semesters building internal tools for the university libraries.
The problems I like tend to sit where distributed systems meet math. Once something is in production, predictability and reliability are what actually matter, and getting a system to behave the same way every time is the part that keeps my attention. AI pulls me in from the same angle: these models are unpredictable by nature, so what interests me is how you build a system around one that stays reliable anyway. I have been taking courses to get a better handle on it.
Outside of work I follow fashion closely, watch far too many movies, spend a good amount of time in the gym, hike across different national parks, and travel with friends and family whenever time permits. I also mentor at hackathon weekends whenever I get the chance.
Experience
- 2026 - now
Research Assistant, USC Interaction Lab
I build and run the training pipeline for a contrastive sentence embedding model on dialogue data, from ingesting de-identified transcripts through evaluation. When the loss flatlined I spent two weeks blaming the model before profiling the data path, then expanded the corpus 4x and it converged.
- Python
- R
- PyTorch
- HuggingFace
- Data Pipelines
- 2023 - 2025
Software Development Engineer, Amazon
I owned automated fulfillment guardrails across Tier-1 services, which took automated sortation throughput up 15% and item accuracy up 8%. I also wrote the mixed integer programming models behind sub-same-day placement for a $1B+ program, and moved a set of legacy hardware dependent paths onto managed AWS for $600K a year in savings.
- Java
- AWS
- Mixed Integer Programming
- Distributed Systems
- DevOps
- Automated Testing
- 2023
Full Stack Engineer, WeAreHousing
Built signup, auth, and the dynamic property upload flow end to end in Nuxt and Django. That flow is what got the first 20+ regional property owners onto the platform.
- Nuxt.js
- Django
- AWS
- 2022
SDE Intern, Amazon
Built internal data verification tooling for a first-mile inventory placement service in Vue and Java. Came back full time the following year.
- Java
- Vue.js
- AWS
- Distributed Systems
- 2022
Web Developer Intern, Penn State Libraries
Built an IMLS funded Jekyll site that serves Data Curation Network materials to 19 university libraries nationwide.
- Jekyll
- 2021
Business System Analyst Intern, Penn State Libraries
Automated faculty research data audits into a CRUD process in Ruby, which took validation from a week down to 3 hours.
- Ruby
Projects
A shell, written from scratch
In progressRead, tokenize, resolve, execute, in Java, with nothing doing the interesting parts for me. Five builtins, PATH resolution, and process execution, so git and everything else on PATH runs inside it. It is built on interfaces and registries, so adding a builtin is one new class instead of another branch in a switch.
- Java
- Maven
- POSIX
- Process API
Trade operations platform
ShippedFull stack operations software for a scrap trading firm, managing $20M in trade volume with role based access across the lifecycle. It generates 7 regulated trade documents in one click, replacing a stack of paperwork that used to be assembled by hand.
- Next.js
- TypeScript
- Supabase
- Postgres
This site
ShippedThe page you are reading. Astro with no client framework, so the whole thing is one HTML file under 30KB and the only JavaScript is the tab switching. Every word on it comes from a single typed data file, which is the reason a personal site ever stays current: adding a job means appending to an array, not editing markup.
- Astro
- TypeScript
- CSS
Contact
The best way to reach out to me. It lands straight in my inbox.