Ashwin Malkani — Software Engineer

Projects

Things I've built.

Complete, deployed, and in daily use.

Smart Home

Light Automation

A web dashboard for LIFX smart bulbs with a sunrise wake-up ramp the native app doesn't offer — lights fade from dim warm light to full-brightness cool white over a configurable window, blended into one continuous sunrise.

View on GitHub

Bedroom Lights

Sunrise automation with per-minute stepped fades that blend seamlessly
Editable presets — save any bulb state as a named scene
Full manual control: power, brightness, warmth, and color per bulb or group
Persistent settings with atomic writes; API token never echoed to the browser

Node.js Express LIFX Cloud API node-cron

Finance

Rental Tracker

An income and expense tracker for a two-unit rental property, with a live cash-flow dashboard, Schedule E tax summaries, and in-browser mortgage statement parsing.

Live at rental.ashwinmalkani.dev — private, access-gated

Rental Tracker · demo data

Monthly cash-flow charts with per-unit income splits
Mortgage statement PDF upload — principal, interest, and escrow parsed in the browser
Schedule E tax view with CSV export for the CPA
Serverless on Cloudflare Workers + D1, gated behind Google OAuth

Cloudflare Workers D1 / SQLite Chart.js pdf.js Cloudflare Access

Experience

Where I've worked.

Oct 2025 — Present

Visa

Software Engineer — Visa Token Services · Foster City, CA

Extend the cloud token framework for commercial and business cards, enabling company-issued cards to enroll in Apple Pay.
Lead development for a major business release, adding 20 new token-risk and device-info fields to consumer APIs while navigating compliance and regulatory constraints.
Designed a Claude skill to monitor and automate CI/CD pipelines, saving the team roughly 40 hours weekly.
Built a new Apple Pay eligibility endpoint, cutting ineligible enrollment attempts and reducing 4XX errors by 34%.
Validate multi-region compliance across China and global datacenters, adapting endpoint behavior to jurisdiction-specific requirements.

Apr 2024 — Oct 2025

Stanford University

Software Engineer — Enterprise Technology · Redwood City, CA

Built a distributed storage system on Oracle Advanced Queues implementing a Pub/Sub model with load balancing in mind.
Created a Pinecone vector database from parsed technical documentation for semantic search and retrieval.
Developed a Claude-powered RAG application that analyzes SQL error logs and generates automated email reports with targeted solutions at 94% accuracy.
Maintained the student classes site — Lambda functions fetching course data from Snowflake, caching strategies, and APIs hosted on AWS API Gateway.
Implemented caching that cut the site's error rate from 12% to under 0.5% during peak enrollment.

Jun 2023 — Sep 2023

Visa

Software Engineering Intern · Austin, TX

Improved code efficiency across 20+ C++ and ASM files and presented changes in code reviews for production readiness.
Built a Flask-based internal tool that simplified TPFDF database querying for non-technical users.
Adapted DFDL file output formats to make Python tooling more scalable and reusable.

Jun 2022 — Sep 2022

i2Chain Inc

Software Engineering Intern · San Francisco, CA

Implemented a QLDB in AWS with MySQL and JavaScript, reducing storage costs and isolating transactions for added security.
Tested API functionality and performance with Postman, verifying data integrity in the ledger.
Optimized API query times with async/await patterns.

Education

Where I've studied.

University of Southern California

M.S. Computer Science · Jan 2025 — Dec 2026 · 4.0 GPA

Information Retrieval, Web Technologies, Natural Language Processing, Machine Learning, Databases.

UC Santa Cruz

B.S. Computer Science · Jun 2020 — Mar 2024

Computer Architecture, Algorithms, Operating Systems, Networking, Compilers, Parallel Programming, Full-Stack Development.

Skills

C++ Python JavaScript SQL Node.js AWS (Lambda, API Gateway, Bedrock) Cloudflare Workers MongoDB Linux Git