~/kartik $ whoami
Kartik Gounder. MS CS at Columbia, New York. Graduating Dec 2026, open to full-time roles.
The problems I like are the ones where the answer has to actually run: on real data, on real hardware, with real users waiting.
Industry
Rapidflare
Working directly with customers to get the product running on their real problems.
Research
Columbia, with Prof. Tian Zheng
Distilling papers into a form an AI agent can build from, and a reader can chat with to understand.
Teaching
Columbia
Helping run the course I took last spring: privacy-enhancing tech, regulation, and where they meet.
Architecture Diagrams From a Conversation
Pick the Right Claude Code Skill
Trust-Aware Orchestration Layer
ML Data Labeling Platform
Instrumented every tool-discovery call at Vertex before touching a prompt. That is where the 36.11% token cut came from.
78 tests at Vertex, 144 on TAOL. A suite that catches regressions is what lets you keep changing things.
The Pi and Arduino on my desk report live into this site. When they go down, you watch them go down.
Three papers and two patents, every one from an artifact I actually built and ran.
"AI²: Building AI Systems with AI" ran September 18 to 20 at VIT, where I wrote my first research papers, landed my first internships, and figured out I love building things with AI. Supporting it felt like a small way to give back to the place that gave me my start.
AI is changing how software gets built, fast, and students shouldn't have to wait for their first job to learn to work with it. Using the tools isn't enough. You have to design, test, and build real systems with them, and that only comes from getting your hands dirty.
Thanks to the graVITas team for putting it together, and to Dr. Shashank Mouli Satapathy for making it happen.
// off-hours: iced mochas, running, tennis, and whatever's half-built on my desk