Safal Gautam

Safal Gautam

New York, NY

About

I'm a software and data engineer based in New York. I work on data platforms, backend systems, and applied AI, turning messy information into something people can actually use.

I enjoy figuring out how all the pieces fit together: where the data comes from, how to make it reliable, and how to build useful software around it. Most days, that means a mix of writing code, working through data problems, and keeping things running in production.

Work

May 2024 — now

Software Developer at Stealth startup

Remote · Data & AI engineering

I look after engineering for the data platform, working across large-scale web scraping, ingestion, event-driven pipelines, databases, and backend APIs. I handle architecture, development, deployment, and the day-to-day work of keeping data fresh and systems reliable.

I also work on AI engineering, building data agents for extraction, cleanup, validation, and audits across web pages, PDFs, images, and spreadsheets. I build MCP tools that let AI applications access and work with our data, alongside the platform's existing APIs.

May — Aug 2021

Backend Engineer Intern at Masovison Technology

Remote

Built Node.js APIs for a map-based application, including authentication, role-based access, and geolocation services.

A project I've been working on

Developer tools

Context

Shared memory for engineering agents

Engineering decisions tend to get scattered across repositories and conversations. I built a searchable context warehouse so coding agents can find the decisions, architecture notes, and incident lessons behind the code.

Markdown holds the source material; SQLite FTS5 handles search. A local MCP server makes it available to Claude Code and Codex, with hooks to capture new context as work happens.

Research

2023 · IEEE ISCMI

Sign language recognition

Combined CNN and LSTM models to recognize signing gestures over time, using L2 regularization to address overfitting.

Published as “Sign Language Translator for Dumb and Deaf” · Safal Gautam et al. · pp. 198–202

2022 · IRJET

Covid Face Mask Detection Using Neural Networks

Used MobileNetV2 to distinguish properly worn, improperly worn, and absent masks, reporting 97.25% accuracy.

Volume 9, issue 9 · pp. 664–670

Education

2023 — 2025

Fordham University

M.S. in Computer Science

New York, NY · GPA 4.0 / 4.0

2019 — 2023

Vellore Institute of Technology

B.Tech. in Computer Science & Engineering

Vellore, India · GPA 9.09 / 10

Things I work with

Python, JavaScript, SQL, FastAPI, Django, React, PostgreSQL, Kafka, Kubernetes, Google Cloud, and MCP. I also work with scraping tools and the observability stack that keeps the pipelines understandable.