Hello, I'm —

Arjun Avtani.

Software Engineer

What I keep chasing

Every spike is something I built, joined, shipped, or could not stop thinking about.

2021 - now

212326

The short version

Machine learning engineer who keeps accidentally starting companies. Most days I'm wrist-deep in Knoy — an AI runtime that picks the right model for the right intent, instead of betting the farm on one.

Studying Engineering (Honours) at the University of Sydney, somewhere between distributed systems lectures and 2 a.m. deploys. Previously shipped UniSlay, ran Intraverse delivering 7-day MVPs to fellow founders, and wrote a book back when 2022 still felt optimistic.

What lives in my head right now

AI SystemsLLM InfrastructureMulti-Agent ReasoningFounder BrainLate-Night Tinkering

Read this site in four sittings: building, academics, dreams, side quests. No particular hurry.

What I actually spend my days on

Building.

A few companies, an acquisition, a long list of small jobs that taught me everything else.

Companies & products

01

Knoy

Building now
Dec 2025 — Present

Chief Everything Officer

An AI runtime that picks the right model for the right intent, instead of betting the farm on one.

  • Intent-based routing across 20+ providers — the right model gets picked the moment we understand the intent, not after the user has retried three times.
  • Built Main — the default mode that answers as one model would, with the routing quietly baked in underneath.
  • Prefetching intent — anticipating the likely next question so the follow-up answer feels practically free.
  • Built the runtime end-to-end: routing, billing, auth, the small things that make a product feel finished.
02

NextDocs

In build
Apr 2026 — Present

Founding Engineer

Create beautiful docs and slides in seconds with AI — and somehow not the kind that look AI-made.

  • Working on the rendering and theming side — fonts, brand kits, exports — so the output reads as designer-written, not template-filled.
  • Joined as one of the founding hands. Learning what 'founding engineer' actually means after 11 p.m. on a Tuesday.
03

UniSlay

Acquired
Aug 2024 — Sep 2025

Co-Founder

A peer-to-peer student guidance platform connecting students across 600+ universities — honest conversations, no agents, no rankings.

  • Matched students with peers who had already navigated the same decisions — degrees, countries, careers, migration — through 1-on-1 chats rooted in lived experience.
  • Led product end-to-end, from the first paper sketch to growth, partnerships and onboarding the marketplace itself.
  • Designed the incentives so both sides walked away with something real. Now acquired.
04

Intraverse Technologies

Jan 2024 — Aug 2024

Founder & Full-Stack Developer

Shipping enterprise code for fellow founders. MVP in 7 days. A team of 6 cracked prompt engineers.

  • Ten-plus production dashboards and AI agents shipped in under two weeks — partly because we refused to schedule alignment meetings.
  • Owned the pipeline end-to-end (ask → Figma → code → deploy), which is just to say none of us slept much.
  • Cold DMs, referrals and one lucky LinkedIn comment thread is how we got every client. No pitch deck involved.

Roles, opportunities & internships

Mostly chronological. Mostly the ones that taught me something.

  • INCUBATE

    Mar 2026 — Present

    Entrepreneur in Residence

    Sydney, NSW

    Inside USYD's pre-accelerator. Mostly: take Knoy from a working product to a properly fundable company — without losing whatever made it work in the first place.

  • IBM

    Feb 2026 — Present

    IBM Z Student Ambassador

    University of Sydney

    Representing IBM Z and mainframe technology on campus. Main job is making the word "mainframe" stop sounding like 1972 to engineering students who, like me a year ago, had never touched one.

  • Engineers Australia

    Dec 2024 — Present

    Student Ambassador · Contract

    University of Sydney · On-site

    Helping students figure out the gap between studying engineering and actually being one. Mostly answering "is this degree worth it" — short answer, yes; bring snacks.

  • Enactus Sydney

    Aug 2024 — Apr 2026

    Startup Director, then Member

    Sydney, NSW

    As Startup Director (Aug 2025 — Apr 2026): led Bridge, an AI-first education platform built under Enactus, owning product direction and team execution. Before that, a year as a sub-committee member contributing to social entrepreneurship initiatives across the org.

  • Sydney University Data Society (SUDATA)

    May 2024 — Nov 2025

    Tech Sub-committee

    Sydney, NSW · On-site

    Built and maintained the backend systems and admin panels for the society portal (600+ monthly users), and supported the technical side of every event we ran.

  • Teletrack

    Jun 2025 — Sep 2025

    Software Engineer Intern

    Ultimo, NSW

    Refactored the core application for mobile responsiveness and joined a couple of internal research initiatives across the stack. First proper "production codebase" experience; minor humbling involved.

  • Cicero AI · USYD (SIEN2001)

    Feb 2025 — Jun 2025

    Sustainability & Business Analysis Project

    University of Sydney

    University-industry project analysing Cicero AI's business and financial structure, exploring how UN Sustainable Development Goals could fit into their operations and growth strategy.

  • Sydney Precision Data Science Centre

    Aug 2024 — Nov 2024

    Junior Researcher · Internship

    Sydney, NSW · Hybrid

    Eight-week research stint analysing clinical data on Lumbar Nerve Stenosis. Worked with R and SQL alongside the research team, applying data-science methods to a real-world health problem (and explaining ensembles to twelve very polite professors).

  • SheRecycles

    Ongoing

    Tech Volunteer

    Remote

    Helping a women-led recycling initiative get a tech stack that doesn't get in the way of the actual work. Quietly building so the people on the ground can stay there.

  • Red Dot Innovative

    Jun 2024 — Jul 2024

    Quality Assurance Intern · Internship

    Singapore

    Automated testing using PyTest and Selenium during my first year of university. Mostly learned that QA is product work in disguise and that nobody loves you more than the dev whose bug you actually documented.

  • Commonwealth Bank

    Mar 2024 — Jun 2024

    Brand Ambassador · Internship

    Greater Sydney · On-site

    Ran campus events on financial literacy and product awareness. Discovered that a good tote bag is, in fact, a closing argument.

The credentials, sort of.

Academics.

Engineering degree, several side rabbit holes, one ongoing thesis I won't bore you with.

Education

University of Sydney

2023 — 2027

Bachelor of Engineering (Honours), Software

Specialising inIntelligent Distributed Systems & AIWith a minor inInnovation & Entrepreneurship

Translation: I get to take systems classes in the morning and pitch decks to professors in the afternoon. Both feel like cheating.

Technical skills

AI / LLM

OpenAIAnthropicGeminiRoutingAgentsRAG

Languages

PythonTypeScriptC++SQLJavaC

Frameworks

Next.jsReactFlaskDjangoTailwindShadCN

Data

Scikit-learnPandasCNNs

Databases

PostgresSchema designSupabase RLS

QA

SeleniumPyTestCoverage analytics

Cloud / DevOps

GitGitHub ActionsVercelDockerAWSCloudflare

Half of these I learned because I had to. The other half because I couldn't fall asleep.

Awards & programs

  1. 01

    INCUBATE Pre-Accelerator

    Mar 2026 — Present

    University of Sydney

    Inside USYD's startup pre-accelerator with Knoy. Honestly still mostly learning how to ask better questions.

  2. 02

    FoundersHack Sydney 2026

    2026

    NextGen Ventures

    Built Darby in 72 hours — a multi-agent research platform running frontier models in parallel. Slept zero, learned a lot.

Three things I need before we're properly friends

Not in the LinkedIn-bio sense. In the call-me-at-3am sense.

Hunger.

Not the loud kind. The quiet kind that makes you reopen the laptop on a Sunday because the problem is more interesting than the brunch.

Loyalty.

I'll tell you the truth before I tell you what you want to hear, then show up the next day anyway. Usually with coffee.

Curious.

Enough to ask the third question — the one after the polite two. If we get there, we'll probably end up good friends.

The list I keep editing

Dreams.

Five things I actually want, written down so I can't pretend I forgot.

The list

  1. 01

    Open the best NGO for stray dogs this country has ever seen.

    A serious one. Vets, kennels, real adoption pipelines, a name that doesn't make donors flinch. Because the best dogs in this country are still nobody's.

  2. 02

    Coffee with a new person every single morning.

    Founder, retiree, taxi driver, twelve-year-old chess prodigy. Doesn't matter. Conversations are the only compounding asset I actually trust.

  3. 03

    Build beautiful things, on purpose.

    A design philosophy I keep stealing back from myself: if it doesn't look like someone cared, then nobody did. Software, products, sentences — same rule.

  4. 04

    Three companies, in three lifetimes I haven't had yet.

    Each in a field I had no business starting in. Healthcare, energy, education. Whichever order causes the most respectful chaos.

  5. 05

    Own only four Ferraris.

    Four. Not five. The fifth one is when you stop being interesting and start being a guy with five Ferraris.

Philosophy I keep stealing

Half work things, half life things. Both keep me honest.

Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.

Most days the best thing you can do is not the fast thing. The fast thing comes naturally once you stop forcing it.

Bet on people, not decks.

Whatever you're starting, the spreadsheet is wrong; the people you're starting with are the only thing the next year will actually depend on.

Stay a student, forever.

The fastest people I know are the ones still embarrassed by what they shipped six months ago. Embarrassment is a leading indicator.

Care visibly, not loudly.

Don't perform caring; just remember the small thing. Birthdays. The bug they mentioned. The thing they said they were nervous about.

Last time I rewrote this list, half of it was wrong inside a year. That's the point.

Hit me up

Connect.

Founder DMs always open. Cold emails read same-day, replied to within two.

Book time

A real slot, no email thread.

cal.com/arjun-avtani/15min

© 2026 Arjun Avtani · Built late at night with too much typing.