Hitika Dalwadi.

AI/ML Engineer | MS in Artificial Intelligence | Ex-ZS | Ex-ISRO

About.

An AI/ML Engineer working towards building Responsible and Efficient AI systems.

I believe AI can absorb a lot of mundane work and allow us to focus on complex problems solving, but that promise only holds true if we can audit what these systems produce at every step and understand the consequences of their outputs. Recently, my team and I won the Red Hat and Open Accelerator Hackathon where we built a MCP governance system that inspects incoming request. That pushed me further, and I built a prompt injection detecting system using NLP techniques.

I bring a strong technical foundation, a security-first mindset, and experience handling complex data at scale. Along with my work in healthcare CRM, I have gained exposure to research and problem-solving through a research internship at ISRO (Indian Space Research Organisation). I regularly read technical blogs and podcasts to stay current with the evolving landscape of AI and data systems. To document and reflect on my learning, I maintain a Substack where I share insights and practical takeaways .

Experience & Education.

Sept 2023 — Jun 2025

ZS Associates

Data Solutions Engineer

Built and maintained ETL pipelines across 80+ healthcare data sources for pharmaceutical clients. Worked customer unification and data profiling using SQL and Salesforce Data Cloud for identity resolution across CRM lifecycle, led stakeholder walkthroughs, and owned data quality documentation. Resolved data ingestion issues and reduced storage and compute costs by 30%.

Jan 2023 — Jul 2023

Confluence Lab, Birla Institute of Technology

ML Research Intern

Research internship focused on CNN-based semantic segmentation for surgical instrument detection. Compared deep learning architectures across model evaluation metrics F1-score, precision and recall and visualization to identify performance on detecting instrument edges and overlapping regions.

May 2022 — Jul 2022

Indian Space Research Organisation

Research Intern

Build a prototype to automate Variable Power Combiner tuning via MATLAB–Arduino stepper motor control. Implemented sensor feedback loops for gain stabilization in ring resonator systems. Analyzed signal variance with aim to improving precision and control while calibration in satellite communication.

Sept 2025 — May 2027

Northeastern University

MS Artificial Intelligence · Khoury College of Computer Sciences
Intro to Machine Learning & Pattern Recognition Foundations of AI Applied Data Processing in AI Algorithms and Data Structures
Jul 2019 — Jul 2023

Nirma University

B.Tech · Instrumentation and Control Engineering
Machine Learning Robotics and Control Systems MATLAB Programming and Simulation Computer Vision

Projects.

AI Agent Governance System

Most Innovative Use of MCP at Red Hat × IBM Hackathon

A MCP Firewall which sits between external AI Agent and MCP server. Reverse proxy using LangGraph to process JSON-based requests through policy enforcement rules, validating intent and returning real-time ALLOW/BLOCK decisions.

MCP Python LangGraph FastAPI

Algorithmic Bias Audit in LLM Based Resume Screening

Built an evaluation pipeline to quantify racial bias across Gemini and Ollama/Qwen models. Leveraged statistical analysis such Welch's t-test, Cohen's d; along with NLP techniques to identify bias across scores and rationale.

Statistical Analysis Visualisation Python SciPy NLP JSON Parsing

Prompt Injection Detection with Vector Embeddings

Built a classification system using Sentence-BERT embeddings, ChromaDB, and distance-weighted KNN. Implemented cosine similarity search over ChromaDB vector database to classify prompts as benign or malicious and t-SNE and UMAP visualizations to understand vector embeddings.

Sentence-BERT ChromaDB KNN Dimensionality Reduction NLP

Autonomous Robot Control Via Centralized Image Processing

Flipkart GRID 3.0: National Finalist - Top 10 India

Developed and validated a vision-based multi-robot navigation pipeline. Used overhead cameras for perception, pose estimation, and global path planning. Implemented ArUco markers for object detection, localisation, and coordination movement.

Computer Vision Localisation MQTT Protocol Stepper Motor Control Robotics Arduino

Neurological MRI Classification - Architecture Comparison

Evaluated five deep learning architectures (ResNet-50, EfficientNet-B0, DenseNet-121, MobileNetV2, ViT-B/16) on multi-class classification of rare neurological diseases from brain MRI scans using PyTorch. Applied transfer learning with ImageNet on limited medical imaging data ( 280 samples/class) using data augmentation to reduce overfitting. Visualised CNN performance on classification metrics and Grad-Cam visualisation.

Pytorch Deep Learning Model Evaluation Grad-Cam Analysis Hyperparameter Tuning
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Blog & Research.

Skills.

Languages
Python SQL MATLAB
ML & AI
PyTorch TensorFlow LangChain Hugging Face scikit-learn LangGraph Hyperparameter Tuning
Retrieval & Agents
RAG pipelines Vector Database FastAPI Natural Language Processing Model Context Protocol
Data & Cloud
Salesforce Data Cloud ETL Pipeline Snowflake AWS (S3 and Sagemaker) MLFlow
Workflow
Git · GitHub Docker Claude Code CI/CD

Connect.

Got an idea, a role, or a question? Let's talk.