Hitesh Aidasani

Senior Software Engineer — AI / LLM Platforms · New York, NY · (917) 512-3053 · hitesh@gmail.com

Full-stack engineer and engineering leader, 25+ years building production software and platforms. Recent work focuses on AI/LLM applications—open source model integration, evaluation tooling, and real-time context injection for game AI (demoed at the Tribeca Film Festival, 2024). At Merck, built and scaled enterprise platforms for clinical trials and grew a team from 1 to 6. JD, University of Chicago Law School.

Projects

StageCouch / AJTapes

2026 — SwiftUI tvOS · FastAPI backend · Shipped to TestFlight

Designed and built end-to-end an Apple TV streaming app for an archival collection of 2,300+ live recordings on the Internet Archive, with a direct-to-device streaming architecture (no media proxying) that keeps hosting costs trivial at scale.
Engineered a real-time audio pipeline: gapless AVQueuePlayer playback, 48-band FFT analysis via MTAudioProcessingTap and Accelerate, and 11 audio-reactive Metal-shader visualizers with TV burn-in prevention.

Freely Spoken & Idle Ashes

2026 — Expo/React Native · FastAPI backend · Shipped to TestFlight

Built a privacy-by-architecture iOS app that transcribes speech on-device (Apple Speech) and runs sentiment analysis and anonymization locally via Apple Foundation Models, transmitting only sanitized text — no raw audio, transcript, or device identifiers — to a FastAPI backend.
Architected as a single shared codebase (~95% reuse) on one backend powering multiple variants: Freely Spoken (Bible) and Idle Ashes (423-verse Dhammapada), with a Stoic edition in development; backend uses a resilient multi-provider LLM chain with canonical-text verification and crisis-aware passage filtering.

Open Source

NousResearch/hermes-agent (149k★)

Apr 2026

Contributed core fixes to the OpenViking memory plugin — pseudo-URI normalization, response-shape hardening, per-level truncation, exception fallback, and regression tests. Three commits preserved in the maintainer’s consolidated fix (PR #17869, merged April 2026).

Experience

Contractor — York Run

Feb 2026 – Present · New York, NY (early-stage startup)

Developing data pipelines for a real estate legal technology platform.

Cybersecurity Consultant

2025 · Celebrity Net Worth

Diagnosed and resolved a cache-poisoning attack on a high-traffic WordPress/Cloudflare site.

Contract AI Engineer

2023 – 2024 · Ink Stories (game studio), New York, NY

Built a FastAPI backend powering LLM-driven NPC dialogue for an open-world NYC game, using a Nous Research open source model selected over commercial alternatives for more authentic, diverse character voices.
Developed context engineering features that injected real-time Unreal Engine state (weather, events) into each character’s LLM context; built a SvelteKit evaluation harness for dialogue quality testing.
Integrated a real NYC resident as an in-game NPC through interview-based style capture and ElevenLabs voice cloning. Prototype demoed at the Tribeca Film Festival, June 2024.

Associate Director, Computer Sciences

May 2019 – Mar 2023 · Merck & Co., Branchburg, NJ

Assembled and led a high-performing team of up to six engineers developing and supporting last-mile data science applications; rebuilt the team in 2022 following significant turnover. Owned hiring, onboarding, and mentorship.
Barnum: Principal engineer and technical product owner for an enterprise Q&A and knowledge platform built on React/Next.js, Node.js, MongoDB, and Elasticsearch. Reached 100k+ users across 500+ stakeholder groups in every North American clinical trial and delivered 10M+ notifications.
Constellar: Lead developer for an AI-powered mentorship matching platform using embedding models and bipartite matching. Won the CTO’s Innovation Challenge; matched thousands of mentors and mentees globally.
SALAR Apps: Created a lightweight framework for turning Jupyter-based ML models into secure internal web apps via reusable React/Next.js components.

Senior Developer, Computer Sciences

May 2015 – May 2019 · Merck & Co., Branchburg, NJ

Designed and built Barnum from prototype (2016) to production (2017) as sole developer, establishing the MERN + Elasticsearch foundation.
Founding member of MOSC (Merck Open Source Committee, 2015–2023): governed open source adoption and published company software on Merck’s public GitHub.
Organized Merck’s first global hackathon (2015) and represented Merck at multiple HackRU events at Rutgers.

Contract Developer, Innovation Group

Jan 2014 – May 2015 · Merck & Co., Branchburg, NJ

Built a cloud-native MEAN stack application as part of one of the earliest teams at Merck to adopt cloud infrastructure and Elasticsearch.
Developed front end for a prototype personalizing pharmaceutical instructions by consumer language and reading level, in collaboration with McKinsey and Booz Allen Hamilton.

Junior Developer

Feb 2011 – Jan 2014 · Box of Robots (game studio, ex-PlayStation founders), Laguna Niguel, CA / Remote

Shipped VIP Life for Android (published by ngmoco) and contributed to Let’s Attack for iOS on a 4-person core team.
Coded game views in JavaScript and Objective-C, built MEAN-stack admin tools, and managed DevOps on AWS EC2.

Technical Skills

AI / LLM: LLM application development, prompt and context engineering, embeddings, evaluation harnesses, open source and commercial models (Nous Research, OpenRouter, ElevenLabs)

Backend / Full Stack: Python, JavaScript/TypeScript, FastAPI, Node.js, Express, React, Next.js, SvelteKit, MongoDB, Elasticsearch, REST APIs

Cloud / Infrastructure: AWS, DigitalOcean, Linux/Unix administration, CI/CD, Git, Cloudflare

Additional: Unreal Engine integration, Objective-C/iOS, Swift/SwiftUI, WordPress, data pipelines

Volunteer & Community

Capstone Project Mentor — Murillations (Jan 2025 – Present) · Moravian University, Department of Computer Science — Mentoring undergraduate CS students on a data journalism project transforming Regulations.gov into a searchable database.

Education & Certifications

Mastering LLMs for Developers & Data Scientists — Maven, 7-month cohort, 2024

Juris Doctor — University of Chicago Law School, 2007

B.A. Economics — Columbia University, 1998

Earlier Career & Distinctions

NYC Games Forum Fellow (Microsoft-sponsored), 2013
Prize-winning team, Los Angeles AngelHack, 2012 — mobile video-chat prototype
IT Specialist, Asian Americans for Equality, NYC, 2001–2003
CTO, EMFocus.com (angel-funded, 10-person startup), NYC, 2000–2001
Contractor, Site59.com via BCG / Indigo Labs, NYC, 1999–2000