CS + Math @ Penn State, graduating December 2025. I build things that solve real problems, usually involving too much coffee and late night debugging sessions.
Currently breaking (and fixing) LLMs at Scale AI while trying to convince my meal plan optimizer not to suggest I eat chicken tenders for the fifth day in a row.
reverse engineering Penn State's dining system because I was tired of losing meal plan money
├─ Mealer - scraped 5000+ transactions from 150+ students
├─ built MFA-aware Puppeteer bots that don't get blocked
└─ turns out idempotent Celery tasks are harder than I thought (97% sync rate after many failures)
replicating economic research papers for fun (and because someone said I couldn't)
├─ EPU-Index - ingesting 50,000+ news headlines via ProQuest API
├─ TF-IDF + spaCy pipeline hit 0.72 correlation with the real EPU index
└─ learning that backfilling at 1500/min without rate limits requires... creativity
teaching a MIPS CPU to not explode (extended my architecture project way past the deadline)
├─ implemented forwarding, hazard detection, stall control
└─ added jal and jr support because why not
##3x hackathon winner 🏆
won mHacks with Decluttered.ai - AI-powered marketplace automation
won BitCamp with FinGuard - phishing detection browser extension
won HackPSU with FinGuard - your bread and butter vision based pose detection Model
M8 - event platform serving 5000+ users
hit 1440 req/sec at p95 latency under 180ms, learned more about connection pooling than any tutorial could teach
Decluttered.ai 🏆 - won mHacks 2024
multi-agent workflow crawling and classifying products, reduced content creation from 30min to 12min per item
homeharmony-platform ⭐ - real estate platform with Stripe
learned that payment flows have more edge cases than a dodecahedron, live at sub-space.me
Mealer ⭐⭐ - 150+ Penn State students trust this daily
hardest part wasn't the code, it was convincing people to give me their dining credentials
FinGuard 🏆 ⭐ - won BitCamp, stops phishing attacks
built because my roommate almost lost $500 to a fake Venmo email
BlockHouse - financial data analysis platform
TypeScript + charting libraries, processing market data in real-time
SecureWater - IoT water quality monitoring
TypeScript stack tracking contamination alerts
eduAI - AI scheduling assistant for students
built for Nittany AI Showcase, parses messy syllabi into actual schedules
BERT4Rec - product recommendation system
SVD to compress 128D embeddings to 10D while keeping 92% of the data, hit 64% recommendation accuracy
CourseCrafter - smart course schedule optimizer
helps students build schedules that don't result in 8am classes three days in a row
fitness-pose-coach - AI form tracking
turns out detecting if someone's squat form sucks is harder than I thought
tutoring calculus and linear algebra at Penn State Learning since Feb 2025
turns out explaining eigenvectors to freshmen at 8am is harder than implementing them
leading Penn State Esports web dev (yes, we have an esports team)
coordinating 4 developers who all want to use different React patterns
research with Dr. Wu on assembly parser-printers (NSF REU Summer 2025)
Python + OCaml combo that made me appreciate type systems
Wenlan-Research - built product rec systems for Prof Yu and Rangaswamy
that BERT4Rec project above, created product embeddings using fuzzy matching
MASBio research with Dr. Jacobson cleaning bioenergy datasets
learned that "cleaning data" means "discovering 47 different date formats"
daily
when I need to
experimenting with
- wrote a Verilog CPU and then kept adding features nobody asked for
- competed in job simulations for companies I'll probably apply to
- once optimized PostgreSQL queries at 2am and saw an 18% improvement (couldn't sleep after that)
- maintain a chess engine that uses minimax (it's decent but not great)
- unironically enjoy writing documentation
if you're working on something interesting, need help debugging something weird, or just want to argue about whether tabs or spaces are better (it's spaces), hit me up
📧 mantavyamahajan08@gmail.com
🔗 portfolio • linkedin
currently looking for full-time SWE roles starting December 2025 (H-1B sponsorship needed, but I promise I'm worth the paperwork)
"most bugs are just features you haven't documented yet" - me, at 3am, convincing myself the crash is intentional