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
- Talks on open source at IndiaFOSS 2.0 in Bengaluru and MEC.Conf 2023
- A 6-hour LLM workshop at NIT Calicut with Kurian Benoy and Nithin Sabu
- Speaking at the International Conclave on Generative AI and the Future of Education 2.0, organised by IHRD under the Government of Kerala
- Mentoring at HackMIT and Johns Hopkins’ HopStart, and judging HackDavis at UC Davis
- Representing Athena at IBM’s Customer Advisory Board in New York
- In 2026 the US approved me for an O-1 visa, the one for people with “extraordinary ability”, and my college put it on its homepage.
See all my talks, workshops and highlights → (and the slides from my talks). 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 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.