Nikhil Gupta
Founder, CTO at Vapi (YC W21)
San Francisco, California, United States
Summary
🤩
Rockstar🎓
Top SchoolNikhil Gupta is a founder and CTO with nine years of software engineering experience, currently leading AI-focused startups Vapi (YC W21) and Superpowered out of San Francisco. He blends hands-on backend engineering—evidenced by contributions to the well-regarded Anserini Lucene toolkit, where he improved JSON parsing and nested-structure support—with product leadership and rapid startup iteration. His background spans research and production roles at companies like Rakuten, SigOpt, and ConsenSys, and an undergraduate engineering stint at Waterloo, reflecting a mix of academic rigor and industry pragmatism. Comfortable shipping robust data-processing systems, he has a knack for finding and removing dead code and surfacing clearer error messages—small improvements that materially raise system reliability.
9 years of coding experience
Y CombinatorSoftware Engineering • Dropped Out, Software Engineering • Dropped Out at University of Waterloo
English, Hindi, Sanskrit
Github Skills (11)
lucene10
javas10
json10
jsonp10
information-retrieval10
jsonb10
java10
data-structure9
error-handling9
data-structures9
bibtex8
Programming languages (18)
Github contributions (5)
castorini/anserini
Jan 2020 - Mar 2020
Anserini is a Lucene toolkit for reproducible information retrieval research
Role in this project:
Back-end Developer
Back-end DeveloperContributions:14 commits, 20 PRs, 9 pushes in 2 months
Contributions summary:Nikhil primarily contributed to improving the Anserini project's functionality and robustness. They fixed errors in the JSON collection processing by adding more descriptive error messages for missing fields and removed dead code from a Lucene document generator. Furthermore, the user added support for nested JSON structures within the core collection, enhancing data parsing capabilities. The user also contributed to the bibtex indexing, demonstrating experience in data processing and Lucene integration.
reproducibleretrievalluceneinformation-retrievaljava
VapiAI/client-sdk-web
Oct 2023 - Mar 2025
This package lets you start Vapi calls directly in your webapp.
Contributions:1 release, 24 reviews, 14 PRs in 1 year 5 months
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