Applied AI Engineer · Forward Deployed Engineer

I ship,
and I show.

I’m Ishan Sharma.

I'm an engineer who builds and ships, with the receipts to show for it.

Half a million users at Amazon. A proprietary AI video company. A production RAG system I built and ran on my own. I go deep in AI, and I've shipped across enough rooms to be useful in most of them.

I like the messy part: take a vague brief, sit with the customer, and turn it into something running in their production. That's the work I want more of.

things I've built

Two things you can go use right now.

Both are live. Open them, poke at them, see for yourself.

www.bloort.ai/ · demo
01AI agent & interview platform · Founder & Lead Engineer · 2025–present

Bloort

An AI platform I took from a solo prototype to a paid product on live client sites, then kept building. It's grown from a RAG chatbot into an agent sandbox for building and testing AI agents, plus an AI interview platform. The live demo still shows the core loop: paste a URL, watch an agent get built in about a minute, then talk to it with no signup.

  • Ran it as a paid product on live client sites. I owned the sales calls, onboarding, and billing, the whole loop from first conversation to a deployed agent.
  • Made it multi-tenant and hardened for production: per-client Pinecone namespaces, layered prompt-injection defense (an LLM guard with a deterministic regex fallback), SSRF and XSS filtering, and email and phone PII masking before anything is stored.
  • Added a semantic cache that reuses retrieved context when a new question is at least 0.88 cosine-similar to a past one, cutting Pinecone lookups and LLM cost, then wrapped model calls in retry-with-backoff, timeout races, per-run cost ceilings, and dry-run gating on irreversible actions like placing a call.
  • Gave the agent real tools over the Model Context Protocol, including a calendar server it queries for live availability, plus outbound VAPI voice and Twilio WhatsApp for lead callback and owner alerts.
  • Backed it with versioned golden datasets and a failure-mode taxonomy: an agent-trajectory eval caught the bot hallucinating a tool argument (an invented appointment date) and took the 6-scenario suite from 5 of 6 to 6 of 6, and my retrieval evals rejected a fancier hybrid retriever that scored worse than plain dense search on an already-clean corpus (recall@1 fell from 95% to 70%).
  • Next.js
  • TypeScript
  • LangChain
  • OpenAI
  • Pinecone
  • MCP
  • VAPI
  • Twilio
  • Firecrawl
  • Firebase
  • Railway
handscenes.vercel.app/ · demo
02Hand- and body-tracked browser apps · live

HANDSCENES

A growing suite of camera apps you control with your hands or your whole body, all running in the browser. No install, no upload, nothing leaves your machine. Every dependency is vendored behind a strict CSP, so at runtime the page makes zero third-party requests and does all its tracking on-device.

  • Jump Runner turns your live pose skeleton into an endless runner: physically jump to clear obstacles and crouch to duck, tracked with MediaPipe Pose.
  • Sign School teaches ASL fingerspelling Duolingo-style: a rule-based checker reads your handshape from 21 hand landmarks and coaches you live ('straighten your index') until each letter is right.
  • Dive Signals does the same for recreational scuba hand signals, checking each one live from your webcam.
  • Made several hand-tracked creative animations that drew 150 users in just two weeks, all organic.
  • three.js (WebGL2)
  • MediaPipe Hand + Pose
  • p5
  • GLSL
where I've worked

A few rooms I’ve been useful in.

  1. Bloort · Founder & Lead Engineer

    Remote · 2025 – Present
    Applied AI / agents

    Built and led an AI platform from zero to production, directing a team of three. It began as a RAG chatbot on live client sites, with an ingestion pipeline, retrieval stack, agent and guardrails, eval harness, an auto-branding algorithm that reads each client's palette from a screenshot, a dashboard, and subscription billing. Since then it's grown into an agent sandbox and an AI interview platform, with me running the customer conversations directly throughout.

  2. Amazon · Software Development Engineer

    Toronto · 2022 – 2023
    Consumer hardware

    Shipped landing-page and auth features on Amazon Kids+ for Kindle to 500,000+ users, contributing to a ~20% revenue increase. Lifted successful sign-ins ~15% with accessibility-compliant auth, led A/B testing that improved retention ~10%, and cut customer-reported bugs ~25% with automated testing.

  3. Moonvalley.ai · Full-Stack Engineer

    Toronto · 2024
    Generative AI

    Moonvalley builds its own proprietary AI video model. I worked on the product side, building a generative image canvas app in Vue.js with real-time generation and editing, and cut time-to-market by about 30% with a modular backend.

Before & during UofT

  • SatSure Software Engineer Intern · 2021 · Bengaluru

    Built a full-stack tracking app for satellite-data analytics and cut compute time 25% with faster libraries.

  • Innis College, UofT Web & Product · 2020–21 · Toronto

    Took StarterKit, a recruiting tool for international students, from idea to 4,000 users in two months.

  • RBC AmpHacks Hackathon · 2020 · Toronto

    Built and pitched an SMB-mentor matching platform over a weekend. 2nd of 25 teams, plus Most Socially Innovative.

  • While One Software Engineer Intern · 2020 · Toronto

    Built chat and ratings backend for a peer-to-peer currency exchange app; grew signups 80% with cross-platform packaging.

Education

University of Toronto

B.Sc. (Honours), Specialist in Computer Science

Toronto · 2017 – 2022

Coursework
Artificial intelligenceComputational biologyInteractive mediaAlgorithms & data structuresNumerical analysis
off the clock

Away from the keyboard.

What I get up to when I'm not at a keyboard.

Drumming

drums.ish

I play drums, and built a little home studio to record in. I post the videos as I go.

Podcast

The NoteLess Podcast

A podcast I host, sitting down with working musicians to talk about how they actually make a life out of it.

PADI Advanced Open Water

Diving

Got my basic and advanced open-water licenses over the last few years. Nice to be a beginner at something again.

what I work with

The toolkit, briefly.

Applied AI
RAG pipelines · agent orchestration · eval harnesses · vector DBs · prompt engineering · LangChain · OpenAI · Pinecone · Firecrawl
Full-stack
TypeScript · Python · Next.js · React · Vue · Node · FastAPI · Firebase · PostgreSQL
Infra & delivery
AWS · Vercel · Railway · Docker · CI/CD · production observability

get in touch

Got something you want
built fast?

Open to founding engineer roles, a technical cofounder spot, or AI builds for hire. If you’re making something and want someone who can own a whole system and prove it works, send me a note.