Founding Engineer at Wonder AI · New York

Ananya
Barthakur

AI engineer. Building agents, the evaluation systems that tell you whether they work, and the infrastructure that keeps them running in production. Previously at Microsoft.

01/Experience

Wonder AI

Founding Engineer

Aug 2025 — Present

New York, NY

  • Agentic Systems. Built a production agent — a multi-step system that plans and executes tasks autonomously, with isolated execution environments, secure secret handling, and verification of completed work
  • LLM Application Architecture. Tool selection and routing across services, retrieval that grounds responses in per-user context, multi-model fallback for availability, and async workflows for long-running agents
  • Evaluation & LLM Observability. Offline datasets and harnesses for model evaluation, prompt versioning, and online monitoring that turns user signals into a hallucination metric tracked per prompt version and model
  • Regulated-Data Infrastructure. Architected the platform for HIPAA readiness
  • Production Foundations. Stood up the engineering foundation — end-to-end observability and tracing, alerting and on-call, a managed API surface, and automated test coverage across every deploy pipeline

Microsoft

Software Engineer

Jul 2023 — Jun 2025

Seattle, WA

  • AI Integration. Integrated Generative AI into Microsoft's content platform, boosting efficiency by 80% across 2B+ support pages
  • Frontend Architecture. Modernized frontend with React, Redux, and Fluent UI, migrating legacy systems while ensuring accessibility and performance standards
  • Schema-Driven Development. Built form-based UI with JSONForms, reducing authoring time by 40% and structure error rates by 100%
  • High-Scale Backend Systems. Engineered secure APIs using C#, .NET, Azure Functions, and CosmosDB — serving 15B+ monthly requests with 99.997% uptime
  • Real-Time Data Pipelines. Led development of metadata pipelines providing system insights for 30+ partner teams, enabling 100% content freshness visibility
  • DevOps & Infrastructure. Designed secure local development infrastructure with isolated Azure subscriptions and token-based authentication

Microsoft

Software Engineer Intern

May — Aug 2022

Seattle, WA

  • Built TypeScript + React web app using Microsoft's M365 extensibility SDK, enabling code portability across Teams hosts with 1M+ monthly active users
  • Created cross-host functionality with shared logic for SSO authentication, calling, and messaging features
  • Published open-source sample application using the official Microsoft Teams JS SDK on GitHub

Machine Learning Research

Research Assistant — Dr. Jean-Baptiste Tristan

May 2021 — May 2022

Boston, MA

  • Developed ML models predicting compound solubility from cheminformatics datasets (10,000+ molecules) with R² above 0.95
  • Implemented feature selection using Lasso regression to identify impactful chemical descriptors and reduce model complexity
  • Designed modular ML pipeline with cross-validation, hyperparameter tuning, and comprehensive performance metrics
  • Collaborated with the research team to integrate predictive models into computational chemistry workflows

02/Projects

Hartree-Fock Solver

Python implementation for electronic energy approximation and molecular orbital visualization in quantum chemistry applications.

  • Implemented the Self-Consistent Field (SCF) algorithm for solving the many-electron Schrödinger equation
  • Built efficient integral evaluation and matrix manipulation routines for molecular systems
  • Achieved numerical stability through symmetric orthogonalization and convergence acceleration
  • Designed modular architecture for different basis sets and molecular configurations

Python · NumPy · Quantum Chemistry · Scientific Computing

Computer Vision — Biomedical Application

CNN and RNN models for breast cancer tissue analysis, enabling automated identification of tumor characteristics in TNBC research.

  • Implemented U-Net and FCN architectures for nuclei segmentation in histopathological images
  • Achieved over 90% accuracy identifying cancer nuclei morphology and characteristics
  • Built a comprehensive data augmentation pipeline for medical imaging robustness
  • Designed custom loss functions combining Dice loss and boundary loss for precise segmentation

PyTorch · Computer Vision · Medical Imaging · Deep Learning

H₂ Potential Energy Surface

Kernel Ridge Regression model with Gaussian Processes to predict molecular potential energy surfaces, using PyTorch for automatic differentiation.

  • Implemented Kernel Ridge Regression with custom kernel functions for molecular property prediction
  • Used Gaussian Processes for uncertainty quantification in energy surface mapping
  • Leveraged PyTorch's automatic differentiation for gradient-based optimization
  • Achieved high accuracy predicting molecular configurations and energy landscapes

Python · PyTorch · Machine Learning · Gaussian Processes · Quantum Chemistry

03/Skills

AI & LLM Engineering

LLM agents, Tool calling & orchestration, Prompt engineering, Prompt versioning, RAG, Offline & online evals, LLM tracing & observability, Browser automation agents, Vertex AI, LangChain

Backend

Python, FastAPI, Node.js, C#, .NET, Django, REST API design, Webhooks, Async workflows, PostgreSQL, Schema migrations

Infrastructure & Cloud

GCP, Cloudflare, Docker, CI/CD, Azure DevOps, HIPAA-compliant architecture

Observability & Reliability

Structured logging, Distributed tracing, Metrics dashboards, Synthetic uptime monitoring, Alerting & on-call, Incident response

Frontend

React, Next.js, TypeScript, Redux, Tailwind CSS, Fluent UI

04/Education

Boston College

B.Sc. Computer Science & Philosophy

NCAA Division I Golfer

Graduated 2023

05/Community

Elevate Women Global Hackathon

Judge

2026

The Future Tech Kid — AI for Good Hackathon

Judge

Jul 2026

06/Recommendations

“Ananya has shown strong capability across both front-end and back-end engineering, demonstrating versatility and a willingness to take on whatever the team needed.”
Denise ArchitettoPrincipal Engineering Group Manager, M365Microsoft
“She even mentored an intern gracefully while staying on top of her own commitments.”
Hepcibha AddakulaPrincipal Engineering ManagerMicrosoft
“Ananya swiftly mastered Azure Data Factory and seamlessly took over my responsibilities in my absence, demonstrating exceptional ownership and adaptability.”
Jayalakshmi KaranamPrincipal Software EngineerMicrosoft
Read all recommendations on LinkedIn

07/Writing

08/Contact

Open to conversations about AI products, infrastructure, and hard engineering problems.