Hi! I’m Aldrin, an engineer living in Manhattan. I build and work with AI agents.
What I do
I work at Athena Intelligence, an AI company in Manhattan. We build AI agents that do real analyst work inside big companies: pulling data together, running the analysis, writing it up. I joined in mid-2024, when it was just our CEO and two other people. My title is Forward Deployed Engineer, which in practice means two things. I build a lot of the product (most things you see in our app, I’ve probably touched), and then I go make it work for the people actually using it, sometimes on-site with customers in New York and London.
Before Athena, I was on the GenAI team at Thoughtworks in India and worked on the AI side of Voicenotes, a YC startup. I studied computer science at Model Engineering College in Kerala and graduated with Honours in Machine Learning.
Some things I’m proud of
- My first big conference talk at IndiaFOSS 2.0 in Bengaluru, where my laptop’s Arch Linux broke on stage
- A talk on free and open source software at MEC.Conf 2023, to about 150 people
- A 6-hour LLM workshop at NIT Calicut with Kurian Benoy and Nithin Sabu
- Demoing text-to-song for Thoughtworks at GIDS 2024, which the CTO Emerita liked a lot
- Speaking at the International Conclave on Generative AI and the Future of Education 2.0, run by the Government of Kerala
- Mentoring at MIT for HackMIT, judging HackDavis at UC Davis, and mentoring student startups at Johns Hopkins
- Representing Athena at IBM’s Customer Advisory Board in New York
- And in 2026 the US decided I count as a person of “extraordinary ability” (the O-1 visa), which my college then put on its homepage. I’m still a little amused by that one.
More on the Highlights page, and the things I’ve built are under Projects.
Outside work
I’m into music. I’ve played guitar since high school, mostly for myself, working out songs and melodies by ear. In college I played in our college bands at arts festivals, and I whistle too. A few recordings I like are on the Music page.
I also did drama in college, and one Easter in New York I played Jesus in a Living Stations of the Cross performance at St. Paul the Apostle Church, which is not something I expected to ever write on a website.
I dance salsa too, something I picked up after moving to New York.
I also travel whenever I can. Some favorites so far: Yosemite, the Grand Canyon, New Orleans, Vegas, a winter trip through Amsterdam, Berlin, Barcelona, Rome and Venice, and London and Edinburgh. I write some of those up under Travel.
And I still like tinkering. Small weekend things like NYCGuessr or teaching myself chords with a $64 MIDI keyboard.
Say hi
You can find me on LinkedIn and GitHub.