Debanjum S is a founder and software engineer with 12 years of experience building trustworthy, personal AI and scalable production services from research prototypes to user-facing products. Based in San Francisco, he founded Khoj to create self-hostable, autonomous AI agents and has hands-on experience across the stack—front-end UX improvements, backend integrations, and web interfaces. At Microsoft he scaled the Viva Personal Insights microservice and Cortana briefing experiences, focusing on contextual assistance that improves wellbeing and productivity for enterprise users. His open-source contributions include meaningful backend work on datalad (improving git-annex integration and subdirectory support) and frontend UX and integrations for khoj-ai, demonstrating a blend of systems-level rigor and product polish. Earlier roles in neuroscience data tooling, remote experimentation systems, and community-driven tech initiatives show a pattern of turning complex infrastructure into accessible tools. He pairs academic training in CS and mathematics with a maker mindset, often solving edge-case engineering problems that enable real-world deployments.
12 years of coding experience
8 years of employment as a software developer
Master of Science (M.Sc.), Mathematics, Master of Science (M.Sc.), Mathematics at BITS Pilani
Master of Science - MS, Computer Science, Master of Science - MS, Computer Science at Dartmouth College
Your AI second brain. Self-hostable. Get answers from the web or your docs. Build custom agents, schedule automations, do deep research. Turn any online or local LLM into your personal, autonomous AI (gpt, claude, gemini, llama, qwen, mistral). Get started - free.
Role in this project:
Front-end Developer
Contributions:1 release, 457 reviews, 849 commits in 1 year 10 months
Contributions summary:Debanjum primarily focused on improving the settings page UI by implementing model selection and applying success/failure toasts using a new UI library. They refactored code to remove an unnecessary save button and renamed/moved elements, enhancing the overall user experience. Furthermore, the user added functionality to connect WhatsApp to Khoj by introducing number verification for the settings page.
Keep code, data, containers under control with git and git-annex
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Contributions:213 commits, 34 PRs, 10 pushes in 4 years 11 months
Contributions summary:Debanjum primarily contributed to the Datalad project by modifying code related to the Git and Git-annex functionality. The commits indicate a focus on fixing issues related to the environment variables needed for git annex commands. The user also worked on adjusting the GitRunner helper class to handle absolute paths for GIT_DIR and GIT_WORK_TREE, enabling git and git annex to run from subdirectories and implementing the web interface.
containerspythonkeepversion-controldataset
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