Partha Tarafdar Chicago, IL MS Artificial Intelligence · DePaul ’27

I build AI systems
and ship them.

Software engineer working on retrieval, evaluation, and the unglamorous infrastructure that turns a model into something people can actually use.

Selected work

Janus

Live · leagueoflegends.polaris-ai.org

A grounded question-answering engine for League of Legends. Ask it anything about champions, items, matchups, or the current meta and it answers from real data, cites what it used, and tells you when it doesn’t know rather than guessing.

Every retrieval mechanism is hand-written — no RAG framework. Three strategies run behind one router, each matched to the kind of truth it serves: a version-pinned corpus for game mechanics, typed SQL tables for exact numbers, and a sanctioned live API for statistics that change daily. The generator is only allowed to speak from what retrieval found.

Python · FastAPI · Postgres + pgvector · React · Docker · Caddy · MCP

Faithfulness
5.00 / 5
Curated eval questions
40
Embedding models benchmarked
5
Retrieval strategies
3

Scored by an independent judge model on a hand-curated, double-reviewed golden set. Retrieval defaults change only with measured evidence.

CareerLaunch

Live · careerlaunchonline.com

A job-application tracker built for the part of a job search nobody enjoys: knowing where every application stands. Track statuses, keep résumé versions straight, and see weekly and monthly trends without maintaining a spreadsheet.

Designed, built, and launched solo under Polaris AI Technologies LLC — including the parts that aren’t code: auth, hosting, and the decisions about what not to build.

React (Vite) · Flask REST API · PostgreSQL · Firebase Auth (Google SSO)

Role
Solo
Shipped
2025
Auth
Google SSO

Founded Polaris AI Technologies LLC to ship it, and kept the company as the home for everything since.

Distributed Weather Station

Coursework · source on GitHub

A fault-tolerant ingestion pipeline for Wisconsin weather-station data: gRPC services in front of an Apache Cassandra cluster, with PySpark handling parsing and filtering before anything reaches storage.

The interesting part was the failure behaviour — keeping ingestion correct when nodes drop out, rather than only when everything is healthy.

Python · Apache Cassandra · PySpark · gRPC · HDFS

Storage
Cassandra
Transport
gRPC
Processing
PySpark

Built for UW–Madison’s Big Data Systems coursework.

Also built

Persona Chatbot

GPT-4o chatbot with switchable personas, streaming responses, and memory that survives a refresh.

React · OpenAI API · Local Storage

Voice Assistant

Natural-language voice interface with custom-trained intents for help, chatroom listing, and message retrieval.

React · Wit.ai · REST · NLP

Chat Mobile App

Cross-platform chat with registration, guest mode, and JWTs held in secure device storage.

React Native · Expo · JWT · Secure Store

News Reader

Tag-based article filtering with animated transitions between list and detail views.

React Native · JavaScript

Experience

Jun 2025 — Present

Founder & Full-Stack Developer

Polaris AI Technologies LLC · Chicago, IL

Founded the company to ship CareerLaunch, and have kept building under it since — most recently Janus. Everything from product decisions through deployment and the servers underneath.

Summers 2023 & 2024

Website Administrator

Badminton Warehouse · Schaumburg, IL

Maintained and extended a Shopify storefront in Liquid, HTML/CSS and JavaScript, and wrote Python automation for bulk product updates that cut manual update time by over 60%. SEO work moved most target categories into the top three Google results.

May — Aug 2022

Software Developer Intern

US Cellular · Schaumburg, IL

Automated monthly operations reporting with a Flask and SQLAlchemy API, cutting runtime by 33%, and built the React dashboard that put the reports in front of 40+ people who had been waiting on them by email.

Education

Expected 2027

MS, Artificial Intelligence

DePaul University · GPA 3.6

May 2025

BS, Computer Science

University of Wisconsin–Madison · Dean’s List 2020, 2021

Algorithms · Artificial Intelligence · Big Data Systems · Software Engineering · Data Science · Human-Computer Interaction · Statistics

About

I’m Partha, a Chicago-based engineer finishing a master’s in artificial intelligence at DePaul after a computer science degree at UW–Madison. Most of what I build starts as a question I can’t find a clean answer to, and ends as something running on a server I set up myself.

Janus came out of exactly that. I play a lot of League, and I wanted an assistant that would give me real numbers instead of a confident guess. Getting it to stay honest about what it actually knows turned out to be the interesting part.

Away from the keyboard I’m usually playing pickleball or pickup basketball. I also enjoy writing about this stuff, and I’ve got an AI-focused blog in the works covering retrieval, evaluation, and the parts of shipping an AI system that don’t make it into papers. If you want to talk about any of that, or about a role, the email below is the fastest way to reach me.

Based in
Chicago, IL
Currently
MS AI ’27
Off the keyboard
Pickleball
Writing
Soon

Open to software and AI engineering roles, and to conversations that aren’t about either.