Parbhat Kapila

AI Systems Engineer · Bengaluru

I build AI systems that know when not to act. Most of my work is RAG and LLM infrastructure - retrieval, vector storage, and model routing. I own the whole thing: decisions, features, deploys, monitoring, and the stuff that breaks after launch.

Right now I run five AI products in production, with no team behind them: Sentinel, Cutline, RepoDoc, VectorMail and Visura. I built every layer of every one, and I'm the only person on call for them. Cutline has been running since March: 85 signups, all inbound, and a first paying customer in September, with no ads run.

I'm looking for a full-time role at an early-stage startup where I own real systems and deliver without hand-holding: remote on US/EU hours, in-office in Bengaluru, or relocating to Germany. Hand me the problem and the constraints, and I'll take it from design through deploy and on-call. I reply within 24 hours to anything real. Say hello.

Work

  • Sentinel's dashboard in demo mode, headed: Five deals are slipping.
    SentinelRevenue Intelligence · Permission Layer

    A revenue-intelligence backend whose first question is what it's even allowed to read. Email, calendar, and chat are ingested only when a participant matches a contact synced from your CRM - read-only, fail-closed, and PII-blind.

    • CRM matchrequired on every inbound item
    • Fail-closedon any lookup error
    • Read-onlynever writes to the CRM
    • 2,200+tests
  • Cutline's name over a painting of a film crew shooting by a mountain lake.
    CutlineAI Video Pipeline · 11-12 Stage Director

    One sentence in, one finished MP4 out - directed by a pipeline of up to 12 stages per slideshow, not a template engine. It infers audience, goal, tone, and arc; plans 1-3 shots per story beat, with more beats for longer videos; sources or generates imagery; composes the render. No templates, no creative knobs.

    • 11-12 stagesper fresh slideshow render
    • 1st saleSep 2026, inbound
    • SHA-256avatar cache in Redis
    • Event-keyedpayment webhook dedup
  • RepoDoc's dashboard for a repository while it is being indexed: the indexing meter part-way, then the repo's stars, forks, watchers, issues and description.
    RepoDocCodebase RAG · Indexing Infrastructure

    Ask an unfamiliar repo questions and get grounded, cited answers. Retrieval runs over what each file means - LLM summaries embedded, not raw code - indexing is a durable Postgres lease queue that survives serverless limits, and each answer's estimated model cost is recorded per project.

    • 5-minjob leases
    • 45swork budget under a 60s cap
    • 5 retriesbefore a job dies
    • 1 tarballper pass, pinned to a commit
  • VectorMail's Autopilot panel set to Suggest: follow-ups waiting on you, each with the rule that picked it and an Approve & send button.
    VectorMailEmail Agent · Rules Decide, LLM Drafts

    Reads your inbox, drafts follow-ups, and sends them. Deterministic rules pick the threads: a reminder is due, or the last message came from an external sender and you haven't replied. Rules also decide whether each follow-up sends, waits for your approval, or is dropped; the LLM only writes the draft. Inbox and embeddings live in one Postgres, with no separate vector store.

    • One DBinbox and vectors
    • Dry-runby default
    • 2 gatesbefore an AI reply sends
    • Tenancyin the same WHERE clause
  • Visura's summary of a document, The Ruby Programming Language: key highlights, then the executive summary section by section, with the document's tools down the right: Ask AI, Processing insights, AI Insights, Sections, Knowledge graph.
    VisuraDocument Versions · Hashes Decide, LLM Explains

    Shows what changed between two versions of a document, in your browser, with no upload and no model. Passage boundaries come from each sentence's own hash, so an edit near the top doesn't shift the rest, and a re-upload re-summarizes only what changed. The LLM only explains changes the hashes found, and drops any explanation it can't quote from the document.

    • 19 of 20reused after a one-line edit
    • 12 re-exportsall read as zero changes
    • No uploadand no model to compare
    • Verbatim quoteor the explanation is dropped

Stack

27 tools and 4 practices

  • Layer 1 Frontend (Product UI)

    • TypeScript
    • React
    • Next.js (App Router)
    • Tailwind CSS
    • Remotion
  • Layer 2 Backend & APIs

    • Node.js
    • tRPC
    • Zod
    • WebSockets
    • Dodo Payments
    • Clerk
    • Better Auth
  • Layer 3 AI Systems (Production)

    • OpenAI
    • Claude
    • Gemini
    • OpenRouter
    • RAG pipelines
    • pgvector
  • Layer 4 Data & Infrastructure

    • PostgreSQL
    • Prisma
    • Redis
    • BullMQ
    • Object Storage (S3)
  • Layer 5 Cloud & Deployment

    • AWS
    • Docker
    • Vercel
    • CI/CD (GitHub Actions)

Architecture & Practices Across every layer

  • Distributed systems
  • Event-driven design
  • Multi-tenant SaaS
  • Cost optimization

Walkthroughs

Walkthroughs I recorded on Loom for Sentinel, Cutline, RepoDoc and VectorMail, each 11 to 14 minutes long. Open any one to watch.

Sentinel · Loom walkthrough · 11:16

1,762 contributions in the last yearVerify on GitHub ↗

Writing

Experience

AI Systems Engineer

Independent / Engineering for early-stage startups · Remote

Full ownership of system design, feature delivery, reliability, and iteration - everything here built, deployed, and maintained by me.

Owned backend services, data stores, AI pipelines, and deployment infrastructure, including authentication, payments, and third-party integrations. Debugged production incidents, performance bottlenecks, and scaling limits while deploying continuously without breaking live systems.

Five AI products in production

  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • PostgreSQL
  • Redis
  • OpenAI
  • pgvector
  • Docker
  • AWS

Thanks for scrolling all the way down here. I'm open to full-time roles at early-stage, AI-first startups: remote, in-office in Bengaluru, or relocating to Germany. If that's you, let's work together.

Parbhat Kapila

Rather talk it through? Book a 10-min call