Taught robots to see. Now I ship the boring stuff that makes money move.

Hello! I'm Hardik. For three years I tried to make video models actually understand what they were watching. In August 2026 I traded the GPU queue for production traffic and joined Stripe in Bengaluru as a Software Engineer, building the systems and tooling that make sellers and internal revenue teams dramatically more effective.

Most of that happened at CVIT, IIITH: improving video comprehension in video encoders, devising an Optical Grounding Score to work out where video MLLMs actually point their attention, and multimodal video summarisation, all alongside Dr. Makarand Tapaswi, Subhashini Venugopalan, Dr. Vineet Gandhi and Niranjan Pedanekar.

Two SemEval 2024 papers came out of that stretch, along with a dual degree, B.Tech in Computer Science and an MS by Research in Computational Linguistics, that wraps up this November. The habit never really left, though. I still pick up research-shaped side projects whenever an idea refuses to leave me alone: a re-ranking RAG system over 15,000 legal documents, a 150M-parameter multilingual math model trained from scratch, a career graph for the entire Indian education system. Nobody asked for any of it.

Before Stripe there were detours worth keeping: Big Language Solutions, where I worked with Maciej Modrzejewski to build a digital PDF translation MVP from scratch and scale it to 10,000+ documents an hour; Trexquant, where I spent a summer as a Global Alpha Researcher writing ML and stats models to beat the market; and Sony Research India, where an AI tool I built cut manual video editing time by 70%.

When I’m not coding, you’ll find me jogging, playing football, drumming, snapping photos, editing videos, or geeking out over emerging technologies and startups or lost in mountains. Oh, and I also used to serve as the Vice-Coordinator at E-Cell, IIITH, where I get to collaborate with founders and like-minded students on product ideation and marketing strategies.

That’s a bit about me—now let’s hear about you! Feel free to drop me a message or email on any of my socials; I’d love to connect!