Shagufta Anjum

Shagufta Anjum

Software Engineer, Applied AI at Cognida

San Francisco, CA

I take software from the first customer conversation to production, bringing together applied AI, product thinking and full-stack engineering.

I build AI products end to end — the model pipelines, the services around them, and the interface users touch. My work lives where a convincing demo has to become a real product: ambiguous requirements, messy data, and systems that hold up beyond the happy path.

As a startup engineer I own the full arc of a feature: understanding the problem, shaping the product, then building it across backend, frontend, integrations and LLM pipeline. Before this I worked on more traditional systems, turning complex problems into reliable software. That grounding is why the software, data and product decisions around the model get as much of my attention as the model itself.

What interests me most are the decisions that turn an AI capability into a useful product — what the model should handle, what belongs in conventional software, and how much complexity the problem warrants. I look for the simplest thing that solves the real problem, then make it work in practice.

Cognida

Software Engineer, Applied AIJan 2026 – Present

Architected a persistent context graph for enterprise AI agents, synthesizing data across many sources into interconnected, source-grounded context, with retrieval that combines vector search and graph traversal. Engineer reliable LLM pipelines with schema-constrained outputs, deterministic validation and confidence-based escalation to human review. Build AI-native automation for finance and legal operations, owning delivery end to end across Django services, integrations and frontend.

Amazon

Software EngineerJun 2025 – Dec 2025

Designed and shipped a Bulk User Management feature for Amazon Ads, backed by scalable Spring Boot APIs, improving account operations across 10K+ advertiser accounts.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Graduate Research AssistantSep 2024 – Dec 2024

Built an interactive ReactJS interface with AI-generated visualizations for analyzing human behavior in video, supporting clinical diagnostic research.

GlobalLogic

Software Engineer InternJun 2024 – Jul 2024

Developed a gamified quiz module on a real-time multiplayer learning platform serving 1000+ concurrent users, lifting engagement by 25%.

Dell Technologies

Software EngineerJul 2023 – Dec 2023

Built a computer vision model in PyTorch to identify product label defects in real time on packaging lines, running inference on edge-captured images.

Software Engineer InternJan 2023 – Jun 2023

Built an inventory management dashboard for the manufacturing supply chain — responsive Angular frontend, Java Spring Boot APIs, PostgreSQL — with an LSTM time series model for demand forecasting.

Software Engineer InternAug 2022 – Oct 2022

Developed machine learning models for supply chain prediction, working with historical inventory and logistics data to forecast demand.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Jan 2024 – Apr 2025

Master of Computer Science

GPA 4.0 · Machine Learning and Data Systems

Graduate Research Assistant · ACM · Society of Women Engineers

Mahindra University

Jul 2019 – May 2023

Bachelor of Technology, Computer Science Engineering

GPA 3.95 · Class rank 2 · Dean's List · Departmental honors

President, Alumni Association · VP, Outreach Club · Undergraduate Research Assistant

Personalized Stylistic Text Generation with PEFT & RAG

An LLM-based writing assistant that mimics a user’s writing style. Fine-tunes open-source Llama and Mistral models with LoRA and layers a RAG pipeline at inference. Quantization keeps the whole pipeline trainable locally on your own data.

  • Python
  • Transformers
  • LangChain
  • LoRA
  • RAG
  • Quantization
View repository →

Stats-aware GANs for Image Synthesis

Generating statistically accurate synthetic images for domain-specific applications in medicine and material science. Extends StyleGAN2-ADA with new regularization losses that actively learn domain-relevant statistics.

  • PyTorch
  • GANs
  • StyleGAN2
  • Synthetic Data
  • Regularization
View repository →

Dribble.AI — Temporal Action Spotting in Soccer Video

Automated ball action spotting in soccer matches, localizing and classifying passes, shots and goals with high temporal precision. A hybrid CNN + Transformer architecture trained on the SoccerNet dataset.

  • PyTorch
  • CNN
  • Transformers
  • Video Understanding
  • SoccerNet
View repository →

Documenting Human Behavior in Videos

A tool for analyzing human behavior in video for clinical diagnostic applications, using GPT-4o for multimodal video and language understanding.

  • LLMs
  • Multimodal AI
  • GPT-4o
  • Gradio
  • AI Research

Time Series Forecasting of Store Sales

A forecasting model for store sales that accounts for seasonality and trend, drawing on sales history, holidays, oil prices and transactions. Combines hypothesis testing and feature engineering with both statistical and ML models.

  • Python
  • XGBoost
  • LightGBM
  • Prophet
  • Feature Engineering
  • Pandas
View repository →

VisionAid: Assisted Living Tool for the Blind

A computer vision smart-home system for locating household items, built on a YOLO-v4 detector trained on a custom dataset and wrapped in a voice-enabled web app for accessibility.

  • Python
  • YOLO-v4
  • TensorFlow
  • OpenCV
  • Object Detection

Neural Architecture Search with Differential Evolution

Applying Differential Evolution with the NSGA-II algorithm to multi-objective optimization, searching neural network architectures against competing objectives rather than a single score.

  • Python
  • NSGA-II
  • Differential Evolution
  • Multi-objective Optimization
View repository →

Document Reranking with LLMs

Exploring listwise reranking methods that use large language models to reorder retrieved documents by relevance, improving the quality of retrieval pipelines.

  • LLMs
  • Information Retrieval
  • Listwise Reranking
View repository →

Citation Network Analysis

Network analysis of the arXiv high-energy physics theory citation dataset — graph structure, centrality and community detection across a large corpus of research papers.

  • Python
  • NetworkX
  • igraph
  • Community Detection
  • Graph Analysis
View repository →
Languages
Python · TypeScript · JavaScript · Java · SQL
AI & Machine Learning
Large Language Models · AI Agents · Retrieval-Augmented Generation · Vector Search · Knowledge Graphs · Structured Outputs · LLM Evaluation · Human-in-the-Loop · Fine-tuning · LoRA / PEFT · Quantization · Multimodal Models · Computer Vision · NLP · Deep Learning · Reinforcement Learning · MLOps
AI Tooling
PyTorch · TensorFlow · Hugging Face · Scikit-Learn · MCP · OpenAI API · Llama · Mistral · Gradio · XGBoost · LightGBM · OpenCV · YOLO
Web
Django · FastAPI · Flask · Spring Boot · Node.js · Express · REST APIs · OAuth 2.0 · JWT · React · Next.js · Angular · Tailwind CSS
Data & Storage
PostgreSQL · MySQL · MongoDB · DynamoDB · Redis · Pinecone · Kafka · Pandas · NumPy
Cloud & Systems
AWS · Docker · Kubernetes · CI/CD · GitHub Actions · Distributed Systems · Event-Driven Architecture · Observability

If you're building something where AI has to hold up in front of real users, I'd like to hear about it — roles, interesting problems, or just a conversation. The fastest way to reach me is email.