Karthik Nair

Backend • Cloud • AI-Powered Applications

I build software products from idea to deployment, combining backend engineering, cloud infrastructure, and AI-powered workflows. My work focuses on scalable SaaS platforms, multi-tenant systems, and practical solutions to real-world problems through thoughtful system design and modern cloud technologies.

View Projects Download Resume

01 — About

Engineer, first.

I'm a software engineering undergraduate who enjoys building products that solve practical problems through thoughtful engineering. My work spans full-stack development, backend systems, cloud infrastructure, and AI-powered applications, with a strong focus on designing software that's reliable, scalable, and maintainable.

Over the past few years, I've built production-style SaaS platforms covering API design, database architecture, authentication, cloud deployment, AI integration, and multi-tenant systems. Rather than treating projects as one-time demonstrations, I continuously refine and improve them as I learn new technologies and better engineering practices.

I care more about how software behaves in real-world environments than how impressive it looks in a demo. Building secure APIs, maintaining data consistency, designing scalable architectures, and improving developer experience are the kinds of problems I genuinely enjoy solving.

B.Tech, Computer Science and Engineering

SRM Institute of Science and Technology, Ramapuram

Aug 2023 – May 2027 · CGPA: 9.59 / 10

English — Full Professional

Tamil — Limited Working

Malayalam — Native

01: Backend Engineering
Designing secure and scalable backend systems using REST APIs, authentication, RBAC, and modern database architectures.
02: Cloud Computing
Building and deploying cloud-native applications with Docker, Linux, GCP, AWS, and production deployment workflows.
03: System Design
Architecting maintainable software with scalable data models, multi-tenant architectures, and reliable backend workflows.
04: AI Engineering
Integrating LLMs, OCR, and intelligent automation into practical software products to solve real-world problems.
05: Full-Stack Development
Building responsive, production-ready web applications using Next.js, React, TypeScript, and modern frontend technologies.
06: Continuous Learning
Exploring distributed systems, cloud infrastructure, DevOps practices, and emerging technologies through hands-on projects and experimentation.

02 — Engineering Philosophy

The principles that guide how I build software.

I enjoy solving practical engineering problems, continuously improving my work, and building systems that remain useful long after the first release.

Build with a purpose

Every project should solve a real problem. I prefer understanding the problem first and then choosing the right technologies instead of building around a technology for its own sake.

Keep it simple

I believe good software is easy to understand, maintain, and extend. I try to avoid unnecessary complexity and focus on writing clean, structured, and readable code.

Think beyond the current feature

While building new functionality, I try to design systems that can support future requirements without needing major rewrites. Scalability starts with good design decisions.

Learn through building

Most of what I've learned has come from building projects, breaking things, fixing them, and improving them over multiple iterations. Every project teaches me something new.

Balance engineering and product thinking

Writing code is only part of building software. I try to understand how people will actually use what I'm creating and design features that improve the overall experience rather than simply adding functionality.

Never stop improving

I rarely consider a project truly finished. Whether it's performance, architecture, UI, or developer experience, I enjoy revisiting my work, refactoring it, and making it better with every iteration.

03 — Experience

Where I've worked.

Roles ordered from most recent to earliest.

Backend Developer · Quantum Scripts

Nov 2025 – Jan 2026

Part-Time

Contributed to the backend development of an AI-powered subtitle generation platform, working across databases, cloud infrastructure, media-processing workflows, and production deployments.
Migrated the platform's core data layer from Supabase to MongoDB to improve transactional reliability within payment and credit-management systems. Designed and implemented REST APIs supporting large video uploads, asynchronous processing pipelines, and media retrieval workflows.
Worked extensively with Docker-based deployments, Linux servers, SSH-managed infrastructure, and cloud environments, gaining hands-on exposure to how modern applications are deployed and maintained in production. Integrated AWS S3 for large-scale media storage, implemented Razorpay payment and credit-management workflows, and supported live GCP deployments by troubleshooting issues affecting active users.

Frontend Developer, Industrial Training · Integral Coach Factory (ICF), Ministry of Railways

Jun 2025 – Jul 2025

Completed industrial training at the ICF IT Centre, gaining first-hand exposure to software development and operational workflows within a Government of India organization.
Developed a complaint management portal using Next.js, React, and Tailwind CSS, focusing on responsive user interfaces and workflow-driven navigation. Beyond the project itself, the experience provided valuable insight into how technology, teams, and day-to-day operations are coordinated within a large industrial and administrative environment.

Technical Member · CodeKrafters

Nov 2024 – Present

Started my journey in collaborative software development through the Web3 domain, contributing to blockchain-focused projects, hackathons, workshops, and community-driven technical initiatives.
Collaborated on full-stack and blockchain application prototypes involving frontend development, wallet integration, and smart contract interactions. Through participation in hackathons, technical events, peer reviews, and debugging sessions, I gained practical experience working in engineering teams while exploring emerging technologies and expanding my software development foundations.

04 — Featured Projects

Products I've shipped end-to-end.

Each one covers the full stack — from data architecture to the interface shown below.

AI-Powered Proof-of-Work & Accountability Platform

ProjectForge

A full-stack platform for AI-assisted task creation, evidence verification, and accountable progress, built around cryptographic proof, AI-assisted verification, and tamper-evident audit trails so work can be transparently verified.

Problem

Progress tracking tools are easy to game—status updates and completed tasks often have nothing verifiable behind them. ProjectForge replaces self-reported progress with AI-assisted workflows, cryptographically-backed evidence, and immutable audit records that create a transparent, trustworthy history of completed work.

Engineering decisions

SHA-256 cryptographic hashing and append-only audit trails ensure every uploaded proof remains tamper-evident, allowing any modification to submitted evidence to be detected while preserving a transparent verification history.
AI-assisted evidence analysis generates verification summaries and confidence scores to support the review process, while the final verification decision always remains under human control through a human-in-the-loop workflow.
Firebase Authentication and role-based access control (RBAC) enforce secure multi-user data isolation, allowing users to access only their own data while administrators maintain platform-wide oversight. MongoDB provides persistent storage, and Vercel powers global deployment.

Next.jsFirebaseMongoDBVercel

USAII® Global AI Hackathon 2026 Finalist

Code

AI-Powered Personal Finance Platform

SmartSpend

A full-stack fintech platform that automates personal finance through deterministic financial processing, intelligent receipt parsing, and real-time analytics.

Problem

Most expense trackers rely on manual entry, making them difficult to maintain as receipts, UPI payments, and bank statements accumulate. SmartSpend is designed to automate financial record keeping while ensuring every transaction remains deterministic, explainable, and auditable.

Engineering decisions

Designed a deterministic Financial Core that centralizes validation, financial calculations, and business rules, ensuring manual entry, OCR, and bank statement imports all follow the same processing pipeline.
Built a modular OCR and bank statement ingestion pipeline that focuses solely on extraction, while delegating validation, categorization, and financial correctness to the Financial Core for consistent and reliable processing.
Combined rule-based categorization with the Gemini API, using deterministic merchant rules first and AI only for ambiguous transactions, followed by confidence scoring to keep financial decisions explainable and trustworthy.

Next.jsTypeScriptMySQL (TiDB Cloud)Gemini APINextAuth

IEEE YESIST12 2026 International Finalist — Maker Fair track, selected from 2,000+ submissions

Conference Publication (ICGMRFT 2026) — Co-authored and presented “SmartSpend: A Goal-Based Personal Financial Planning Platform for Awareness-Driven Savings”, published in the proceedings of the International E-Conference on Global Multidisciplinary Research and Future Technologies (ICGMRFT 2026).

Code

Operational Logistics Intelligence Platform

SentinelRoute

A multi-tenant operational intelligence platform for logistics enterprises, combining AI-driven decision support, real-time collaboration, and event-driven operations with enterprise-grade tenant isolation.

Problem

Fleet operators often rely on disconnected systems, spreadsheets, and manual coordination, making it difficult to monitor shipments, respond to disruptions, and maintain operational visibility in real time. SentinelRoute unifies fleet operations, intelligence, and collaboration into a single secure operational workspace for every company.

Engineering decisions

Designed an event-driven, real-time architecture using Socket.IO, centralized event dispatching, and shared state synchronization to power live shipment tracking, operational intelligence, collaborative decision-making, and enterprise command workflows without continuous polling.
Built a secure multi-tenant SaaS platform with server-authoritative tenant isolation, Firebase authentication, role-based access control, company onboarding, super-admin verification workflows, audit trails, and hardened WebSocket authorization to prevent cross-tenant data access.
Developed an AI-assisted operational intelligence layer that analyzes shipment risks, predicts disruptions, generates actionable recommendations, maintains live operational feeds, and enables collaborative command-center decisions through real-time synchronization across connected users.

Next.jsTypeScriptMongoDBFirebaseSocket.io

Code

05 — Achievements

Recognized on the international stage.

IEEE YESIST12 2026

International Finalist

Maker Fair track — selected from 2,000+ submissions, for SmartSpend.

Conference Publication (ICGMRFT 2026)

Co-authored and presented

“SmartSpend: A Goal-Based Personal Financial Planning Platform for Awareness-Driven Savings”, published in the proceedings of the International E-Conference on Global Multidisciplinary Research and Future Technologies (ICGMRFT 2026).