# Aniruddha Pai

> Aniruddha Girish Pai is a San Francisco software engineer at Handshake whose public work follows a consistent thread: turning messy questions about learning, discovery, and opportunity into usable systems. His path runs from Dubai school honors and a combined advertising and computer science education at the University of Illinois to student projects, teaching support, product engineering, and a 2025 paper that organizes prompt-engineering methods as reusable patterns.

- **Role:** Software Engineer at Handshake
- **Organizations:** Handshake, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, Graybar, iD Tech Camps, Illinois Brand Health Index Group, National Organization for Business and Engineering
- **Education:** Bachelor's studies in Advertising and Computer Science; minor in Statistics; 3.93 GPA, high honors, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, CBSE AISSCE, Science stream; 95.6%, Our Own High School, Al Warqa'a, Dubai
- **Known for:** Published a 2025 IEEE-indexed conference paper on reusable prompt-engineering techniques., Graduated from the University of Illinois with a reported 3.93 GPA and high honors., Co-built RedditProfessor, a Devpost-listed bot for answering UIUC course and professor questions.

## Career timeline

- **2019** — Completed the CBSE science stream at Our Own High School in Dubai with 95.6%, placing third among the school's science-stream results.
- **2019-2023** — Studied advertising and computer science at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, with a statistics minor and a reported 3.93 GPA with high honors.
- **2020** — Co-created RedditProfessor, a hackathon bot that returned professor information inside the UIUC subreddit.
- **2020-2021** — Worked in student-facing and product roles including data analyst, product developer, CS 125 course assistant, and online private instructor.
- **2021** — Worked as a software engineering intern at Graybar and built Tunemash, a Spotify-data recommendation application.
- **2022** — Was part of a University of Illinois National Student Advertising Competition team that placed third in its district.
- **2023** — Listed among University of Illinois degree candidates in the May commencement program and began his post-university engineering career at Handshake.
- **2025** — Published 'Enhancing Interaction with Large Language Models: A Catalog of Prompt Engineering Techniques' in the IEEE-indexed ICOCT 2025 proceedings.
- **2026** — Public activity at Handshake highlighted intern prototyping and the company's expansion of AI-focused career networks.

## Achievements

- Published a 2025 IEEE-indexed conference paper on reusable prompt-engineering techniques.
- Graduated from the University of Illinois with a reported 3.93 GPA and high honors.
- Co-built RedditProfessor, a Devpost-listed bot for answering UIUC course and professor questions.
- Placed third in district with a University of Illinois National Student Advertising Competition team in 2022.
- Scored 95.6% in the 2019 CBSE science stream at Our Own High School, Dubai, placing third in the school's published results.

## Latest updates

- **2026-08** — Shared Handshake's account of a 48-hour San Francisco intern hackathon and praised the interns' creativity, speed, and thoughtfulness.
- **2026-03** — Shared Handshake's announcement of the Taro acquisition and Software Engineer Talent Network for paid AI model work.
- **2025-08** — His paper on prompt-engineering patterns received the DOI 10.1109/ICOCT64433.2025.11118417 in the ICOCT 2025 proceedings.

## Links

- Website: https://joinhandshake.com
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/aniruddha-pai-073174193
- GitHub: https://github.com/agpai2

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Profile page: https://yespress.io/aniruddha-pai
Published by YesPress — https://yespress.io
Last updated: 2026-09-27