Kanishka Sahu

Applied AI Engineer at Mercor · Former CTO & Cofounder at Neurix AI

I build coding data pipelines, RL environments, agent harnesses, and evaluation systems at Mercor and also co-authored the APEX-v1 benchmark paper. Previously, I co-founded Neurix AI and Sixeye. CSE graduate from Punjabi University with experience scaling products from zero to 500k+ users.

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About

I've been building things since I was a kid — from robots and IoT-powered taxi-top billboards to AI voice agents and commerce platforms. I graduated in Computer Science from Punjabi University in 2021 and have been shipping products ever since.

Currently I work on coding data pipelines, RL environments, agent harnesses, and evaluation systems at Mercor. I previously co-founded Neurix AI. I started Oyela with three friends and scaled it from 0 to 500k+ MAU, and was recognized as the Youngest Child Scientist.

Beyond engineering, I chase adrenaline. I've done the world's highest paragliding in Bir Billing at 2,400m and the world's second-highest bungee jump in Nepal at 228m. I completed an 11-day Vipassana silent meditation retreat — no phone, no talking, 8 hours of daily meditation.

I've explored 30+ places across India and Nepal. By day I build products, by night I'm a tech geek who loves food, travel, dogs, and solving problems that matter.

Experience

Jul 2025 — Present

Applied AI Engineer (Member of Technical Staff) · Mercor

I build coding data pipelines, RL environments, and evaluation systems for AI labs at Mercor. My work has helped scale concurrent evaluations and cut delivery time from 10–12 hours to 2–3 hours.

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Automated coding task generation from open-source PRs and quality checks for thousands of tasks across multiple labs.
Developed RL environments, agent runtimes, and verifiers for APEX-Agents and APEX-SWE, and ran benchmark and client-model evaluations. Implemented ACE and task-specific coding evaluation harnesses, analyzing failures across GPT, Gemini, and Claude.
Enabled thousands of concurrent evaluations through distributed infrastructure, automated grading, loss analysis, and ablation studies, cutting delivery time from 10–12 to 2–3 hours.
Owned Studio's agent harness and verifiers, integrating open-source apps and sandboxed runtimes for Claude Code, Cursor, and OpenCode.
Created FraudGraphs and a human-calibrated agentic review pipeline for trust and safety triage. Centralized location intelligence across millions of data points for 300K+ experts. Reduced compute costs by approximately 75% through autoscaling, document parsing, and caching services.

Coding DataRL EnvironmentsAgent HarnessesEvalsTrust & Safety

Feb 2025 — Jul 2025

CTO & Cofounder · Neurix AI

Neurix AI is a full-stack generative AI company building custom agents, copilots, and internal automation systems. From infra to workflows to deployment, we help you unlock AI's real value.

Generative AIAgentsCopilotsAutomationLeadership

Aug 2024 — Jan 2025

Co-Founder · Sixeye — AI Voice Agent

Built the next communication layer for organizations. Led product development end-to-end, from architecture to shipping code, and engaged with customers to identify best use cases.

AI VoiceProduct EngineeringFull Stack

Mar 2023 — Aug 2024

Chief Engineering Officer · Oyela

Stepped into the Chief Engineering Officer role to lead Oyela's scaling phase. Scaled the platform from 100k to 500k+ MAU and grew API volume from 10k to 250k+ daily calls. Expanded the engineering team from 2 engineers to 12+, owning hiring, architecture decisions, and technical execution across all products.

ScalingLeadershipArchitectureTeam Growth

Jun 2021 — Mar 2023

Founding Member · Oyela

Started Oyela with three friends and owned the entire technology side as a founding member. Built the full tech stack from scratch — the Oyela buyer-side commerce platform, Frontway seller app, internal admin panel, and FastBuy quick checkout — and shaped product direction alongside the other founders. Set up CI/CD pipelines with GitHub Actions and Docker, integrated payment gateways (Juspay, Razorpay), optimized page load from 12s to under 3s, and built the foundation that the platform scaled on.

Founding Member0-to-1Full StackProductAWS

Nov 2019 — Apr 2021

Founder & Director · Lys Labs Pvt Ltd

Designed and developed IoT-powered taxi-top ad displays using real-time cab data, AI, and analytics to target specific audiences. Built the product to early customer stage before COVID-19 forced shutdown.

IoTStartupHardwareAdvertising

Dec 2019 — Dec 2020

President · Entrepreneurship & Skill Development Cell

Led the university's entrepreneurship organization. Managed 8 team leads and 40+ members. Organized talks, hackathons, and provided startup mentorship, labs, and grants to student founders.

LeadershipEntrepreneurshipMentorship

Dec 2018 — Nov 2019

VP of Technology · Entrepreneurship & Skill Development Cell

Maintained organization website and empowered students to transform their projects into real-world applications.

DevelopmentCommunity

Tech Stack

Languages

TypeScript, Python, JavaScript, C++

AI & ML

RL Environments, Post-Training, Evals, Fine-Tuning, Synthetic Data Generation, TensorFlow, PyTorch, OpenAI API, Hugging Face

Frontend

React, Next.js, Tailwind CSS, Bootstrap

Backend

Node.js, Django, PostgreSQL, MongoDB, Redis

Cloud & DevOps

AWS, Docker, Kubernetes, GitHub Actions, Azure

Mobile

React Native, Flutter, iOS (Swift), Android (Kotlin)

Testing

Jest, Cypress, Playwright, Vitest

Tools

Git, VS Code, Figma, Postman

Awards & Recognition

2025

Research Paper — The AI Productivity Index (APEX)

arXiv

Co-authored research on APEX-v1-extended, a benchmark evaluating whether frontier AI models can perform economically valuable professional tasks across investment banking, consulting, law, and medicine.

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2023

Raised $2M in Seed Funding

Prime Venture Partners

Led the technical execution that helped Oyela Technologies secure $2 million in seed funding to expand the team and empower 2 million small businesses in India.

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2021

Award of Excellence

Punjabi University

Highest honor given by the university for exceptional performance in academics, robotics, and AI research.

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2018

Youngest Child Scientist Award

Government of Uttar Pradesh

Awarded by the Chief Minister for contribution and research in plated bomb detection systems. Youngest recipient of this honor.

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2016

Northern India Science Fair

Government of India

Represented Uttar Pradesh at the National Science Centre, New Delhi. Won first prize for the plated bomb detection system project.

Beyond Work

Adventure

World's highest paragliding in Bir Billing at 2,400m above sea level. World's second-highest bungee jump in Nepal at 228m. Explored 30+ places across India and Nepal.

Meditation

Completed 11-day Vipassana meditation course at Dhamma Vipula, Mumbai. No phone, no speaking, 8 hours of daily meditation. Wake up at 3:30 AM, discipline until 9 PM.

Building

I code because I love it. From AI-powered chatbots to scalable commerce platforms to IoT hardware — I enjoy turning ideas into products that work and ship.

Travel

Mountains are my second home. From Manali and Sissu to Nainital and Khajjiar — from spiritual Mathura to bustling Mumbai and Bangalore. Always looking for the next destination.