Staff Software Engineer · Visa

Ashish Bisht builds GenAI that ships.

A decade of backend engineering, now aimed at one problem: taking LLM systems from demo to production in environments where failure is expensive — payments, fintech, enterprise scale.

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About

I'm a backend engineer who moved to the GenAI frontier about two years ago — and stayed, because the hardest problems in AI right now aren't the models, they're the systems around the models: retrieval, evaluation, observability, guardrails, scale.

At Oracle Cloud Infrastructure I helped build enterprise AI services used by over 170,000 people. Now at Visa, I work on GenAI in the payments domain — where "mostly correct" isn't a passing grade.

Off the clock: long drives, Himalayan hikes, One Piece, and building a small LLM from scratch just to know every layer of the thing I work with.

Why "HimalayanMonk"?

The mountains are where I reset. The name — handle @himalyanmonk everywhere — is a reminder to build with focus and without noise. Yes, the spelling is intentional.

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Experience

Staff Software Engineer
Visa · Bangalore · 2026 — present

GenAI systems in the payments domain — building AI that holds up under fintech-grade correctness, compliance, and scale requirements.

Principal Software Developer
Oracle Cloud Infrastructure · Enterprise AI Services

Core engineer on an enterprise GenAI platform scaled from 1,500 to 170,000+ users. Built agentic workflows with LangGraph, RAG pipelines, real-time transcription with speaker diarization, and a PII scrubbing layer — working across 5+ product teams in 3 time zones.

Senior Software Engineer
Amadeus Software Labs

Backend engineering for travel-tech systems operating at global scale.

System Programmer
FireEye / Trellix

Low-level systems work in cybersecurity — where I learned to respect what happens under the abstractions.

Software Engineer
Sonata Software

Where it started.

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Selected Work

Platform

Enterprise GenAI Platform

Core services for an internal AI platform — RAG pipelines, agent orchestration, and the unglamorous reliability work that let it grow 100x.

1.5K → 170K users
Agents

Agentic Email Assistant

LangGraph StateGraph with a supervisor agent for intent routing, MCP integration over Microsoft Graph, conditional edges, and SSE streaming — an agent that actually does the work.

FastAPI · LangGraph · MCP
Signal / Noise

Daily Brief Engine

An intelligence layer that reads the flood so you don't have to — LLM-driven filtering and summarization that cuts ~90% of the noise.

~90% noise filtered
Reliability

API Observability Layer

Middleware metrics and SQL-view analytics giving product teams real visibility into API behavior — built after debugging a production connection-pool exhaustion the hard way.

Production-hardened
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Skills

GenAI / LLM Systems
LangGraphRAG (hybrid search, reranking, RAGAS) Agentic workflowsMCP Vector search — HNSW · IVF · PQPrompt & eval engineering
Backend & Infra
PythonFastAPIKafka PostgreSQLRedisDistributed systems design
Domain
Payments / FintechEnterprise AI at scaleCybersecurity roots
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Side Quests

LLM from Scratch IN PROGRESS

Building a small language model layer by layer — attention, KV cache, the lot — because using transformers isn't the same as understanding them.

ECG × Deep Learning RESEARCH

A passion project exploring AI-based early detection of cardiac conditions from ECG signals. Long game, high stakes, worth it.