# Pratham Shah: Cloud and full-stack engineer

> 2026 Computer Science graduate in Pune and Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer, working on cloud, backend and full-stack systems. Based in Pune, India.

Canonical: https://pshah.fun
Last updated: 2026-10-23

Open to junior cloud, backend and full-stack roles, Pune, India.

Pratham Shah is a cloud and full-stack engineer in Pune: a 2026 CS graduate and Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer.

Internships in Google Cloud cost optimization at Searce and full-stack Next.js and FastAPI work at NeuraMach AI Studios. Outside work I build on AWS and ship small products: a CDK-defined streaming platform, a RAG app on Postgres and pgvector, and a Chrome extension with 2,500+ weekly users.

- [GitHub](https://github.com/pshah-lab)
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/pratham-shah-729432258/)
- Email: pshah88669@gmail.com

## What you can check

Everything below links to something you can open: source code, a live product, a store listing or the role write-up.

- **AWS infrastructure as code**: Cognito with PKCE, CloudFront signed cookies, Lambda, API Gateway and Secrets Manager in one CDK stack, plus a FastAPI + DynamoDB service. ([StreamVault repository](https://pshah.fun/projects/streamvault))
- **Retrieval over your own documents**: PDF chunking, pgvector search with an HNSW index, and grounded LLM answers with rate limits and input checks. ([InsightVault repository](https://pshah.fun/projects/insightvault))
- **2,500+ weekly users on a shipped product**: A Manifest V3 extension with an offline PDF viewer, a privacy test suite and versioned releases. ([Chrome Web Store developer dashboard](https://pshah.fun/projects/force-dark-mode))
- **Paid client work, live**: A marketing site for a residential villa project, delivered end to end, with the client’s own review. ([abhinandanmountreea.com](https://pshah.fun/projects/abhinandan-mountreea))
- **Two internships**: Google Cloud billing and rightsizing analysis at Searce; Next.js and FastAPI product work with a QA focus at NeuraMach. ([Experience](https://pshah.fun/experience))

## Selected work

The two projects on my resume, plus paid client work and a shipped extension. Each has a case study with the architecture and the decisions behind it.

### StreamVault

Video platform on AWS, Aug 2026 – Sep 2026

Invite-only HLS video streaming on AWS with edge-enforced access control. End-to-end video platform: an EC2 FFmpeg pipeline produces multi-audio HLS, Cognito with PKCE signs viewers in, a Lambda issues CloudFront signed cookies, and a FastAPI + DynamoDB service syncs watch progress. Infrastructure is defined in AWS CDK.

Stack: AWS CDK, CloudFront signed cookies, S3, Cognito (PKCE), Lambda, API Gateway.

[Read the case study](https://pshah.fun/projects/streamvault) · [Source](https://github.com/pshah-lab/StreamVault)

### InsightVault

AI product (RAG), Nov 2025 – Sep 2026

Ask questions of your own PDFs and get answers grounded in the passages that support them. A retrieval-augmented question-answering app. PDFs are chunked, embedded into Postgres with pgvector, and searched by cosine similarity before an LLM answers from the retrieved context only.

Stack: Next.js 16, React 19, Supabase Postgres, pgvector (HNSW), OpenAI / Gemini / Hugging Face embeddings, Groq / OpenAI chat.

[Read the case study](https://pshah.fun/projects/insightvault) · [Source](https://github.com/pshah-lab/insightVault)

### Abhinandan Mountreea

Freelance client work, Jul 2025 – Nov 2025

Marketing site for a residential villa project, built for a paying client. Freelance build of a real-estate showcase, from requirements to deployment, with image delivery through Cloudinary (WebP, caching, lazy loading) to keep the image-heavy pages light on mobile.

Stack: React, Vite, GSAP, Cloudinary, WebP.

[Read the case study](https://pshah.fun/projects/abhinandan-mountreea) · [Live site](https://www.abhinandanmountreea.com/)

### Force Dark Mode

Chrome extension, Jan 2026 – present

Privacy-first Chrome extension that darkens websites, PDFs and local documents. 2,500+ weekly users. A Manifest V3 extension, published as Force Dark Mode - ThemeSwitcher under my PshahLab brand, that picks a dark-mode strategy per page, renders PDFs offline in a dark canvas viewer, and syncs per-site preferences. Documents never leave the machine; the only data sent to me is an opt-in usage report and broken-site reports the user confirms one by one.

2,500+ weekly users (source: Chrome Web Store developer dashboard, 28 Oct 2026).

Stack: JavaScript, Chrome Extensions MV3, PDF.js, chrome.storage.sync, MutationObserver.

[Read the case study](https://pshah.fun/projects/force-dark-mode) · [Website](https://darkmode.pshah.fun/) · [Chrome Web Store](https://chromewebstore.google.com/detail/kmhhphbakbhohiohagkhhgdgfbplkfke) · [Source](https://github.com/pshah-lab/force-dark-mode-extension)

### More work

- [NeuroArm](https://pshah.fun/projects/neuroarm) - EEG signal classification and visualization for a brain-controlled prosthetic arm. (Brain-computer interface research, Jul 2024 – May 2025)
- [Cloud Media Hub](https://pshah.fun/projects/cloud-media-hub) - Media upload and storage service that streams files straight to S3 and catalogs them in MongoDB. (Distributed storage backend, Sep 2026)

[All 9 projects](https://pshah.fun/projects)

## Three kinds of engineering, one engineer

Grouped by what I can do rather than by logo. Every line points to where it was done.

### Cloud and infrastructure

Secure, cost-aware systems on AWS and Google Cloud.

- Google Cloud cost analysis: billing data, utilization, rightsizing: [Searce internship](https://pshah.fun/experience#searce)
- Edge-enforced access control with CloudFront signed cookies: [StreamVault](https://pshah.fun/projects/streamvault)
- Serverless pieces: Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB: [StreamVault](https://pshah.fun/projects/streamvault)
- Infrastructure as code with AWS CDK, Cognito and Secrets Manager: [StreamVault](https://pshah.fun/projects/streamvault)

Tools: Google Cloud, AWS, S3, CloudFront, Lambda, API Gateway, DynamoDB, Cognito, EC2, AWS CDK, Docker, Vercel.

### Backend and full-stack

Web products from data model to deployed interface.

- REST APIs in Node.js, Express and FastAPI: [StreamVault, Cloud Media Hub](https://pshah.fun/projects/streamvault)
- Next.js frontends on FastAPI backends (React Query, Axios): [NeuraMach internship](https://pshah.fun/experience#neuramach)
- Next.js and React apps with server route handlers: [InsightVault, this site](https://pshah.fun/projects/insightvault)
- Postgres and MongoDB schemas: [InsightVault, Cloud Media Hub](https://pshah.fun/projects/cloud-media-hub)
- Client delivery, front-end performance: [Abhinandan Mountreea](https://pshah.fun/projects/abhinandan-mountreea)

Tools: TypeScript, JavaScript, Python, Node.js, Express, FastAPI, React, Next.js, PostgreSQL, Supabase, MongoDB, Tailwind CSS.

### Applied AI and research

LLM features grounded in data, and ML on real signals.

- Embeddings, pgvector search and grounded LLM prompts: [InsightVault](https://pshah.fun/projects/insightvault)
- EEG classification with scikit-learn and TensorFlow: [NeuroArm (team research)](https://pshah.fun/research)
- AI-assisted engineering workflow: [Specs and plans in shipped repos](https://pshah.fun/about#ai)

Tools: OpenAI API, Gemini API, Groq, pgvector, scikit-learn, TensorFlow, pandas.

## Now

Updated October 2026.

- **Just finished**: A cloud reliability internship at Searce (Apr – Aug 2026), working on Google Cloud cost optimization, and a B.Tech in Computer Science at MIT-ADT University, Pune. [Details](https://pshah.fun/experience#searce)
- **Shipping**: Force Dark Mode 2.1.0, a Chrome extension with 2,500+ weekly users. The latest release added a side panel, a broken-site report and an opt-in daily usage report. [Details](https://pshah.fun/projects/force-dark-mode)
- **Open to**: Junior cloud, backend, FinOps and full-stack engineering roles in India. [Details](https://pshah.fun/#contact)

## Experience

- [Searce Inc., Associate Cloud Reliability Engineer (Intern)](https://pshah.fun/experience#searce) - Apr 2026 – Aug 2026. FinOps work on Google Cloud: reading billing and utilization data to find waste, and recommending changes that cut cost without hurting performance.
- [NeuraMach AI Studios, AI/ML Full-Stack Engineering Intern (QA focus)](https://pshah.fun/experience#neuramach) - Jan 2026 – Apr 2026. Full-stack work with a QA focus on the core engineering team of an early-stage AI studio: Next.js and TypeScript frontends wired to FastAPI services.
- [Abhinandan Mountreea, Frontend Developer (freelance)](https://pshah.fun/experience#abhinandan-mountreea) - Jul 2025 – Nov 2025. Sole developer on the marketing site for a residential villa project, from client requirements through deployment.
- [IS360 Technologies, Research Developer, BCI NeuroArm](https://pshah.fun/experience#is360) - Jul 2024 – May 2025. Worked on the signal-classification side of NeuroArm, a team brain-computer interface project for controlling a prosthetic arm from EEG.

## Research

On the NeuroArm team at IS360 Technologies I worked on EEG preprocessing and classification for a brain-controlled prosthetic arm, and on a visualization that shows the signal path from brain to arm.

- [Read about the research](https://pshah.fun/research)
- [NeuroArm case study](https://pshah.fun/projects/neuroarm)

## Credentials

- **Google Cloud Associate Cloud Engineer** (Certified), issued 26 July 2026, valid until 26 July 2029, [Verify on Credly](https://www.credly.com/badges/e295f3cf-c88c-4991-a4eb-d68a6c608a88)
- **B.Tech in Computer Science**, MIT-ADT University, Pune, India. Completed 2026.

## Open source

Selected public repositories. Every project on this site that isn't client work has its source here. The HTML page loads the repository list and contribution graph from GitHub: [github.com/pshah-lab](https://github.com/pshah-lab).

## Engineering notes

Walkthroughs of specific decisions in my own code.

- [RAG retrieval that degrades instead of returning nothing](https://pshah.fun/notes/rag-retrieval-that-degrades-gracefully) - How InsightVault’s query path handles weak matches, and the embedding-dimension trade-off behind a multi-provider fallback chain.
- [Protecting HLS video with CloudFront signed cookies](https://pshah.fun/notes/protecting-hls-with-cloudfront-signed-cookies) - Why signed cookies fit HLS better than signed URLs, and how StreamVault issues them after a Cognito PKCE sign-in.
- [Uploads that don’t grow server memory](https://pshah.fun/notes/zero-buffer-uploads-to-s3) - Streaming multipart uploads straight to S3 with multer-s3, and committing metadata only after S3 acknowledges.

## Client feedback

> “The website reflects exactly what we had envisioned - a platform that communicates our brand values, showcases our flagship project, and builds trust with potential customers. His attention to detail, technical expertise, and timely delivery have truly impressed us.”

Abhinandan Group. Freelance client, Abhinandan Mountreea website, November 2025. [See the project](https://pshah.fun/projects/abhinandan-mountreea)

## Contact

I’m looking for junior cloud, backend, FinOps and full-stack engineering roles in India. Email is the fastest way to reach me.

- Email: pshah88669@gmail.com
- [LinkedIn](https://www.linkedin.com/in/pratham-shah-729432258/)
- [GitHub](https://github.com/pshah-lab)
- [Resume](https://pshah.fun/resume)

## Related

- [Projects](https://pshah.fun/projects)
- [Experience](https://pshah.fun/experience)
- [Resume](https://pshah.fun/resume)
- [About](https://pshah.fun/about)