AI Engineer · Hyderabad, India

Agents That Survive Contact With Production.

I build agentic systems, retrieval pipelines, and the evaluation harnesses that prove they work — then attack them until they don't.

WatchingHimouto! Umaru-chan · ep 0/12Last log6 Sep 2026
Track record

Where I've
Been Working

Startups, mostly stealth, mostly remote. Shipping into production rather than writing about it.

  1. 2026

    BlueDot Impact

    Technical AI Safety cohort

    Formalising evals, governance, and adversarial thinking.

  2. Feb 2025 — Present

    Anyfeast

    AI Engineer (CTO)

    Stealth AI startup, London. Remote. Leading AI engineering; 130,000+ recipes across 50+ dietary verticals; led an 8-person team of engineers and doctors.

  3. Jan 2025 — Feb 2025

    Stealth Browser AI Startup

    AI Developer, contract

    Headless agentic QA automation on BrowserUse and AWS Lambda.

  4. Dec 2024 — Jan 2025

    Stealth AI Healthtech Startup

    Research Intern

    Chicago, remote. Tracking patient mental health from clinical conversations with emotion-aware models.

  5. May 2024 — Jan 2025

    Invest4Edu

    AI Engineer Intern

    Hyderabad. ETL over 10M+ records; RAG Q&A at 78% accuracy with refusal handling.

What I do

Three Things,
Done Properly

Most agent demos work once. The interesting engineering is everything that happens after that.

01

Adversarial Evaluation

Test suites built to break my own systems. A 229-case adversarial harness, injection and jailbreak resistance measured rather than assumed, LLM-as-judge with calibrated confidence.

02

Retrieval That Holds Up

Hybrid dense and BM25 retrieval with rank fusion, deterministic guardrail layers, grounded answers with per-query cost tracing. Built for documents where a wrong number is a real failure.

03

Agent Infrastructure

Containerised agents, MCP tool surfaces, credential gateways with per-request secret injection, and human-in-the-loop approval for anything that touches a real credential.

Selected work

Things I Built
And Shipped

Every one of these has either real users, a live demo, or a review that found something I missed.

01

Polly Harness

I broke a local café's AI reservation agent and talked it into refunding a booking it never should have. I built this harness as the proof-of-concept and gave it to the software agency that had shipped that agent — they had no dedicated AI engineering team. They have used it as the template for their new projects since.

A nine-layer refund agent built specifically to be attacked. LangGraph, Qdrant, custom MCP tools.

88.6% pass across 229 adversarial cases · 98.7% injection resistance · 100% jailbreak resistance

02

UltraDoc Intelligence

Built for a profitable TMS company to cut cost and modernise how the organisation actually moves documents around. It was saving them time and adding revenue inside the first week.

Hybrid retrieval over logistics and TMS documents — dense plus BM25 with reciprocal rank fusion, four deterministic guardrail layers, and an LLM-as-judge evaluation framework, traced in Langfuse.

91.9% answer accuracy · $0.003 per query

03

Mentis

Designed as a proof-of-concept for a medtech startup. The PoC was accepted and taken on by their own team for further development and use.

Procurement intelligence briefs for medical substances — product profile, clinical use, market, manufacturers, regulatory status, sourcing and risks, with every claim backed by a verified source URL. Four-step safety escalation, versioned prompts, per-call cost accounting, observable traces.

04

Pugmark

Built to visualise the jungle in my head — the closed-eye-dream version of it. It comes out of a love of deep forests and the novels of Jim Corbett and Kenneth Anderson.

Turns hunting and natural-history novels into illustrated, evaluated bestiaries. Five-stage async pipeline — ingest, extract, validate, enrich, render — with LiteLLM provider abstraction (Gemini primary, Groq fallback, Ollama offline), Wikidata validation, and AI-illustrated PDF export.

05

Pulse

A wearable-first app for smartwatches and bands, built on minimal interaction, haptics, privacy, and a close connection between two people.

End-to-end encrypted messaging. X25519 pairing ceremony, HKDF-derived subkeys, AES-256-GCM. Security review found the six-emoji verification phrase grindable at 2^36 by the relay server — precisely the adversary the design distrusts. Mitigated with iterated hashing.

Log

What I'm Reading,
Building, Learning

Updated whenever something happens. Read, built, learned, watched.

read6 Sep 2026

Introduction to AI Control

Control as the complement to alignment: assume the model may not be benign and build the deployment so it cannot act on that anyway — trusted monitors, human approval gates, task decomposition. The honest caveat is that it only buys a window, and only if the whole industry adopts it.

read6 Sep 2026

How AI could enable critical infrastructure collapse

Reconnaissance, weaponisation and execution compressed from months to minutes against infrastructure running decade-old open-source. The asymmetry is the argument: automated attack against human-paced defence, where the defender’s response time is the thing that has not improved.

read6 Sep 2026

Gradual Disempowerment Summary

No takeover event, just economies, cultures and governments that stop needing human participation to function. The failure mode has no moment you could point at and call it the moment — which is exactly why it is hard to write an eval for.

read6 Sep 2026

AI-Enabled Coups: How a Small Group Could Use AI to Seize Power

Forethought on what breaks when a state no longer needs people to run its coercive machinery — singular loyalty, secret loyalty, and exclusive access to frontier capability. Coups have historically failed because humans defect; a workforce that cannot defect removes the constraint.

read6 Sep 2026

What is input/output filtering in AI safety?

Classifiers sitting in front of and behind the model, screening prompts and responses at inference time. The layer I actually build — and the piece worth sitting with is that a filter encodes somebody’s ruleset, so its training data decides what counts as harmful.

read6 Sep 2026

How AI could enable catastrophic pandemics

Biological uplift as the sharpest case for why refusal behaviour is not a product nicety. Guardrails cluster on US frontier models while a majority of high-risk biological tools ship fully open — the safety property lives in the ecosystem, not in one vendor’s classifier.

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read6 Sep 2026

Constitutional Classifiers: Defending against universal jailbreaks

Anthropic training input/output classifiers on synthetic data from a written constitution: jailbreak success dropped from 86% to 4.4% for 0.38% more refusals and 23.7% compute overhead. Then a public red-team held five days before four people cleared every level — the numbers are the point, and so is the fact that they did not hold.

read30 Aug 2026

The Misguided Quest for Mechanistic AI Interpretability

The counter-argument to everything else in this week’s reading: that mechanistic interpretability may be the wrong bet, and that understanding a model neuron by neuron is neither necessary nor achievable for the safety guarantees people want from it.

read30 Aug 2026

Model Organisms of Misalignment: The Case for a New Pillar of Alignment Research

Deliberately building misaligned models so the failure can be studied under controlled conditions, rather than waiting to find it in the wild. Borrows the logic of model organisms in biology: you need a specimen that reliably exhibits the thing before you can measure whether an intervention works.

read30 Aug 2026

Neel Nanda on the race to read AI minds (part 1)

80,000 Hours interviewing the head of DeepMind’s mechanistic interpretability team — where the field actually is, what it can and cannot tell you about a model yet, and how much of the “we can inspect what it’s thinking” story survives contact with a frontier system.

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read30 Aug 2026

What are probing classifiers?

Train a small classifier on a model’s internal activations and see what it can predict. If the probe recovers a concept, the representation encodes it somewhere — though a probe finding information is not the same as the model using it.

read28 Aug 2026

Introduction to Mechanistic Interpretability

Features and circuits, the polysemanticity problem, sparse autoencoders to untangle it — and the sober reminder that we understand maybe 3% of how frontier models actually work. The theory under why adversarial eval alone isn’t enough.

read26 Aug 2026

What is AI alignment?

BlueDot’s framing of the problem: alignment is not one question but a stack of them — intent, specification, generalisation — and conflating them is where most arguments about it go wrong.

read25 Aug 2026

Why AI alignment could be hard with modern deep learning

Cold Takes on why gradient descent gives you a system that scores well, not one that wants what you want — and why those come apart precisely as capability rises.

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read24 Aug 2026

Recent Frontier Models Are Reward Hacking

METR documenting models that satisfy the metric and defeat the intent. The measurement is the attack surface — the same reason an eval harness needs adversarial cases, not just coverage.

read23 Aug 2026

Multi-Agent Risks from Advanced AI

Cooperative AI’s report on failure modes that only exist between agents — miscoordination, collusion, cascades. Single-agent safety testing cannot see any of them.

Off the clock

Nature, Literature
And Anime

Away from the engineering. The Corbett and Anderson shelves are directly responsible for Pugmark.

Books 44

🧠 Intellectual & Personal Development

  • Sapiens: A Brief History of Humankind Yuval Noah Harari
  • The Power of Your Subconscious Mind Joseph Murphy
  • Who Will Cry When You Die? Robin Sharma

🌍 Wildlife, Nature & Conservation

  • Man-Eaters of Kumaon Jim Corbett
  • The Man-Eating Leopard of Rudraprayag Jim Corbett
  • The Champawat Man-Eater Jim Corbett
  • Nine Man-Eaters and One Rogue Kenneth Anderson
  • Man-Eaters of Manchi Village Kenneth Anderson
  • The Black Panther of Sivanipalli Kenneth Anderson
  • The Man-Eaters of Tsavo J.H. Patterson

🎭 Classic Literature

  • Animal Farm George Orwell
  • 1984 George Orwell
  • Tess of the d'Urbervilles Thomas Hardy
  • Robinson Crusoe Daniel Defoe
  • Metamorphosis Franz Kafka
  • Lolita Vladimir Nabokov
  • Pamela Samuel Richardson

✨ Contemporary & Literary Fiction

  • The White Tiger Aravind Adiga
  • Half Girlfriend Chetan Bhagat
  • The Girl in Room 105 Chetan Bhagat
  • You Are the Best Wife Ajay K. Pandey
  • Will You Still Love Me? Preeti Shenoy
  • I Still Think About You Preeti Shenoy
  • You Are the Reason for My Smile Preeti Shenoy
  • Be My Perfect Ending Savi Sharma

🌀 Magical Realism & Philosophical Fiction

  • Kafka on the Shore Haruki Murakami
  • Men Without Women Haruki Murakami
  • Sputnik Sweetheart Haruki Murakami

🕵️ Mystery & Adventure

  • The ABC Murders Agatha Christie
  • Arsène Lupin Maurice Leblanc
  • King Solomon's Mines H. Rider Haggard
  • Papillon Henri Charrière
  • The Jewel of Seven Stars Bram Stoker

🇮🇳 Indian Literature

  • The Blue Umbrella Ruskin Bond
  • The Bachelor of Arts R.K. Narayan
  • Tara Mahesh Dattani
  • Cry, the Peacock Anita Desai

📜 Poetry & Short Stories

  • The Tell-Tale Heart Edgar Allan Poe
  • The Black Cat Edgar Allan Poe
  • After Twenty Years O. Henry
  • The Luncheon W. Somerset Maugham
  • The Lament Anton Chekhov
  • I'm Nobody! Who Are You? Emily Dickinson
  • Sonnet 55 Edmund Spenser

Anime 65

🌿 Ghibli & Hand-Drawn Worlds

  • My Neighbor Totoro
  • Spirited Away
  • Princess Mononoke
  • Howl‘s Moving Castle
  • The Tale of The Princess Kaguya
  • Grave of the Fireflies
  • The Wind Rises
  • A Whisker Away

🌧️ Films That Ruined Me

  • Your Name.
  • Weathering With You
  • Suzume
  • 5 Centimeters per Second
  • The Garden of Words
  • A Silent Voice
  • I Want to Eat Your Pancreas
  • Josee, the Tiger and the Fish
  • To Every You I’ve Loved Before
  • To Me, The One Who Loved You

🏁 Speed & Fists

  • MF GHOST
  • MF GHOST Season 2
  • MF GHOST Season 3
  • Initial D Final Stage
  • BAKI
  • Baki Hanma
  • Baki Hanma VS Kengan Ashura
  • KENGAN ASHURA Part I
  • KENGAN ASHURA Part II
  • KENGAN ASHURA Season 2
  • KENGAN ASHURA Season 2 Part.2

🧠 Psychological & Thriller

  • Death Note
  • Parasyte -the maxim-
  • Another
  • ERASED
  • The Future Diary

😌 Slice of Life & Chaos

  • GTO: Great Teacher Onizuka
  • Nichijou - My Ordinary Life
  • The Way of the Househusband
  • The Way of the Househusband: Season 2
  • SPY x FAMILY
  • Buddy Daddies
  • The Devil is a Part-Timer! Season 2
  • Chainsaw Man
  • Chainsaw Man – The Movie: Reze Arc

🌸 Romance

  • 365 Days to the Wedding
  • Aharen-san wa Hakarenai
  • Domestic Girlfriend
  • Horimiya
  • Horimiya: The Missing Pieces
  • I Have a Crush at Work
  • Insomniacs After School
  • Kubo Won't Let Me Be Invisible
  • My Love Story with Yamada-kun at Lv999
  • My Tiny Senpai
  • Pseudo Harem
  • Say "I love you".
  • Shikimori's Not Just a Cutie
  • TONIKAWA: Over The Moon For You
  • TONIKAWA: Over The Moon For You Season 2
  • Teasing Master Takagi-san
  • The Angel Next Door Spoils Me Rotten
  • The Dangers in My Heart
  • The Dangers in My Heart Season 2
  • The Fragrant Flower Blooms With Dignity
  • The Ice Guy and His Cool Female Colleague
  • Yakuza Fiancé: Raise wa Tanin ga Ii

Let's Talk

Open to AI Engineer, AI Architect, AI Safety Engineer, and generalist roles — remote, or relocating. Happy to walk through any of the systems above, including the parts that failed.

Get in touch