Sumith Bhandari

From Karnataka to London

From a small town
to systems
people rely on.

I’m Sumith. I build AI agents and backend systems.
This is the story behind the work.

Walk with me Explore my work

Scroll to discover Six chapters, one journey

Skip to the work

  1. 01Before · Karnataka

    State bus · CRT lab · 7:30 am

    Noticing first

    I grew up in a small town in Karnataka, where computer class meant switching one on and opening Paint.

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    When I started engineering in Bengaluru in 2018, most of my classmates had been coding for years. I hadn’t. What I did have was a habit of noticing friction: queues, paperwork, jobs done by hand that didn’t need to be.

    That became how I learned. Pick a real problem, then learn whatever it takes to solve it.

  2. 022020 · Lockdown

    Shuttered street · Open kirana

    The first thing people used

    In the 2020 lockdown, shops opened for a short window each day. The nearest was a kilometre away, and most people around me couldn’t get there in time.

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    We built an app that let neighbourhood shops take orders from the streets around them. It won HackerEarth’s hackCOVID and OneHack in 2020. What mattered more was that real shopkeepers were using it.

    The same year I started freelancing: Flutter apps and Node.js backends for a hospital’s patient registration, a finance company’s field attendance tracking, and a shipbuilder’s iOS app.

  3. 032020 · Drogher

    Kirana counter vs. dark store

    What code alone couldn't fix

    The hackathon app became Drogher Technologies, a quick-commerce platform for local shops. I co-founded it and led the engineering.

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    I designed the mobile and web platform, real-time order fulfilment and inventory for last-mile delivery. We were selected for incubation at Great Lakes in Chennai and signed up our first shops one counter at a time.

    Then heavily funded quick-commerce companies arrived with subsidised delivery, and kirana stores ran on trust and credit that software couldn’t replace. I made the call to pivot: we stopped selling to shoppers and built for other businesses instead, in healthcare, food delivery and co-working. The lesson stayed: a product is only as strong as the business around it.

  4. 042021 · Bengaluru

    Purple Line metro · Late deploy

    Owning what I ship

    In late 2021, in my final year of university, I joined a small Bengaluru startup part-time, and was on the full-time team soon after I graduated.

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    Over three years the work grew from Flutter apps and APIs to data sync between clouds in different regions, payment integrations, and then the backend and AI pipelines of an agentic AI platform: FastAPI services, vector databases and LLM agents.

    When the flagship product was wound down, I stayed and kept its systems running. That’s where I learned that shipping is the start of the job, not the end of it.

  5. 052025 · Leicester

    University clocktower · 6:00 pm rain

    Starting again

    In 2025 I moved to the UK for an MSc in Advanced Computer Science at the University of Leicester.

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    Lectures by day, part-time work for rent, and backend contracts in the evenings. One was a security testing platform, where I built parsers that turn the output of OWASP and open-source scanners into findings a team can act on.

    My Master’s project, Fashion AI, was a styling assistant that starts from the person: skin tone, build and occasion.

  6. 06Now · London

    South Bank · Thames lights

    Systems people rely on

    Now I’m in London, building AI agents, the backend systems they run on, and the security tooling that keeps them honest.

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    I used to measure progress by how fast I shipped. Running a company, keeping systems alive after launch and starting over in a new country changed that. Now I care whether software is reliable, secure and genuinely useful to the people who depend on it.

    I still build the tools I wish existed. Brainvault gives coding agents a memory between sessions, and Claude Anchor keeps each project on the right Claude account. Both started as my own small frictions.

    Continue to the timeline

01 / Beyond the CV

How I work.

The habits that show up in everything I build.

Konkani at home · Kannada, Hindi and English everywhere else · Based in London

02 / The path so far

Journey

The places that shaped how I think, build, and keep going.

  • Python
  • TypeScript
  • FastAPI
  • PostgreSQL + pgvector
  • Tool-calling agents
  • Multi-agent orchestration
  • MCP
  • RAG and retrieval evals
  • AWS
  • Docker
  • Supabase
  • Security automation

Work

  1. Jul 2026 to nowLondon

    Goodspeed Studio

    AI Engineer · Contract, then freelance

    Production AI agents and the backend around them.

    • Built and hardened a production Slack agent used daily by 16+ people: tool calling, prompt caching, file reading, human-review steps and multi-tenant persistent memory, where I traced and fixed a cross-client confidentiality boundary.
    • Built a Python agent on Claude that pulls from job-board and contact-data APIs over REST and webhooks and surfaces about 20 qualified leads a day.
    • Led the production launch of a website chat agent, including a GDPR, PECR and EU AI Act review of data retention and handling across every provider in the stack.
    • Lead production engineering for client platforms: Supabase row-level security audits, production-readiness reviews, release management and rollback drills.

  2. Oct 2026 to nowRemote, UK

    Visiminds Technologies

    Software Engineer · Freelance contract, after a first contract from Jun to Sep 2025

    Security testing (VAPT) automation, in Python and Flask.

    • Built a platform that runs 14 security tools, Nmap, Nikto, Nuclei and TestSSL among them, and turns their results into structured reports, replacing a manual analyst workflow.
    • Designed a five-stage pipeline (scan, parse, aggregate, correlate, report) that normalises every tool’s output into one vulnerability schema, with deduplication across tools.
    • Added a MongoDB-backed job queue with 20 concurrent workers, cutting scan-to-report time by 95%, from about 4 hours to under 15 minutes. It runs weekly and monthly cycles for 10+ enterprise clients.

  3. Nov 2021 to Dec 2024Bengaluru

    TechMachinery Labs

    Software Engineer · Software Development Engineer · SDE 1, part-time

    Joined part-time in my final year, and grew into leading backend and AI work.

    • Led the FastAPI backend of an agentic knowledge platform for industrial engineering design, answering natural-language queries in under 5 seconds.
    • Designed a multi-agent system on AWS Strands that combines pgvector retrieval, a structured materials database and parsed equipment data across 3+ agent types.
    • Built a parsing pipeline that turns unstructured engineering specs into structured JSON with 50+ fields, at 94% accuracy on a 50-document test set.
    • Before that: 10+ REST APIs across a Node.js microservices codebase, role-based access across 5 roles, a payment gateway with full audit trails, and a move from on-premise storage to S3.
    • Started on Flutter apps and Python and Node.js backends over PostgreSQL and MongoDB.

  4. Nov 2020 to May 2022Bengaluru

    Drogher Technologies

    Co-Founder and Engineering Lead

    Co-founded a quick-commerce startup and led its engineering.

    • Built the platform connecting local stores to customers with real-time order management, on Node.js, PostgreSQL, Flutter and AWS, with CI/CD in GitHub Actions.
    • Led a team of 4, and made the technical call to pivot from B2C to B2B consulting.
    • Delivered full-stack products for clients in healthcare, food delivery and co-working.

  5. May 2020 to Dec 2024Bengaluru

    Freelance

    Full-Stack and Mobile Developer

    Mobile apps and backends for healthcare, finance and industrial clients.

    • Healthcare: MongoDB schema design and Node.js services for scheduling, reminders and records, and a Flutter app on a Google Sheets backend.
    • Finance: a Node.js and MySQL backend for attendance and field tracking, run and maintained on a single EC2 server.
    • Industrial: a Flutter app taken through App Store review, with the Node.js services and servers behind it.
    • Earliest work: cross-platform hybrid apps on Firebase.

Study

  1. Jan 2025 to Jul 2026Leicester

    University of Leicester

    MSc Advanced Computer Science, Distinction

    Alongside part-time work and backend contracts. My dissertation, Fashion AI, won Best Technical Project 2026.

  2. Aug 2018 to Jul 2022Bengaluru

    Ramaiah Institute of Technology

    BE Information Science

    Started out behind, and learned by building. Won hackCOVID and OneHack in 2020.

03 / Made with intent

Small frictions.
Useful things.

Software I wanted to exist. So I built it.

01 · Developer tools

Claude Anchor

I use different Claude accounts for different kinds of work, and kept ending up in the wrong one. So I built a small desktop app: pin a folder to an account once, and Claude Code uses the right one in your terminal and editor from then on.

Code on GitHub Launch post Tour with sound

  • Desktop app
  • Claude Code
  • Open source

Brainvault

Coding agents forget everything between sessions, and I was tired of explaining the same things again. Brainvault gives them a memory that lives on your own machine: 12 MCP tools over SQLite full-text and semantic search.

Code on GitHub On PyPI

Fashion AI

My Master's project, and Best Technical Project 2026. A styling app that starts from you: your skin tone, your build, where you're going. It suggests what to wear and can talk you through why, with hybrid retrieval scoring MRR@6 0.91.

There’s always another idea in progress.Follow the builds on GitHub

Thanks for walking with me

Say hello.

If something here made you curious, or you have a problem worth building for, I'd like to hear about it.

sumithsbhandari@gmail.com