Pranjul Rathour: GenAI engineer, campus mentor and speaker. Here is what I bring to your students.

On the mic
On the mic

Originally published at https://pranjulrathour.hashnode.dev/pranjul-rathour-genai-engineer-campus-mentor-speaker. That copy is the canonical version and gets updates first.

Most guest speakers show students slides about AI. I show them the systems I shipped this year, the tests that pass, the bills they run up, and the parts that broke. Then we build one together.

I'm Pranjul Rathour, a GenAI engineer from Kanpur, India. This page is for the people who decide what happens on a campus: placement officers, heads of department, faculty coordinators and student club leads. It covers what I've built, what I've won, who I've mentored, what I can run for your students, and how to reach me.

Contact, up front: pranjulrathour41@gmail.com · LinkedIn · GitHub · Blog on Dev.to · Bluesky

What I've built

Between February and July 2026, at Next Upgrad Web Solutions, I independently designed, built and shipped five production AI applications end to end, each with Docker, CI and observability:

  • RAG.NextUpgrad: retrieval-augmented generation with hybrid dense plus BM25 search, cross-encoder reranking, streamed cited answers, and a confidence gate that refuses to call the model when the retrieved evidence is weak. Runs in about 220 MB of memory on a free tier.
  • FineTune Studio: QLoRA fine-tuning of open models in a browser. Dataset validation, live loss streaming, and side-by-side base-versus-tuned evaluation. Trains Qwen3-1.7B at about 3.2 GB of VRAM. 107 tests pass.
  • FaceVision: face detection, recognition and liveness checks running entirely in the browser with ONNX Runtime Web. The backend stores embeddings only, never images.
  • DocuLens AI: document intelligence for invoices and contracts, with extraction, comparison and deterministic compliance scoring.
  • OCR & Speech Workspace: page-batched PDF OCR, live speech-to-text and document-scoped chat on Mistral's models.

I'm also CTO and Co-Founder of SCULT INDIA, where I lead engineering for a 14-member team, built the internal Studio CRM the agency runs on, and shipped 5+ paid client products, with about ₹1 lakh in revenue in the first six months. I'm completing a BCA at Dr. Virendra Swarup Institute of Computer Studies, Kanpur.

At the VSICS podium, Kanpur
At the VSICS podium, Kanpur

Everything above is public. Your students can clone it, run it and break it. I encourage that.

What I've won

  • 1st prize, Changethon 2025, National Social Summit at IIT Roorkee, with Krishi Gyan, an AI agribot for farmers built on React, Flask and Gemini.
  • 1st prize, Product Genesis, Vividhotsava 2025 at CSJMU Kanpur, presented by Vice Chancellor Prof. Vinay Kumar Pathak, for BrandHive, an AI content platform for small businesses.
  • 1st prize, BYTEBATTLE by MeetKats, against 15+ teams, with Annapurna, a food-sharing platform connecting donors, NGOs and volunteers.
  • Top 3, IIT Kanpur hackathon.

I lost one in December 2025 with a two-minute pitch for a system that took two days to build. That one taught me more about storytelling than the wins did, and it's in the talk.

Who I've mentored

I founded TechVerse Enclave, a developer community of 500+ members, and have mentored 200+ students in web development, AI and careers.

Sessions I've already delivered:

A career session for students
A career session for students
  • AI-powered software development, VSICS Kanpur, 8 April 2025. How AI now sits in every step of the software lifecycle, from requirements to maintenance, with a showcase of our IIT Roorkee project.
  • BCA Induction Seminar, VSICS Kanpur, 6 July 2025. 100+ first-year students. A three-year roadmap: foundations and AI tools in year one, hackathons and internships in year two, placements or a startup in year three.
  • INSIGHT, The Talk Show, VSICS Kanpur, 29 March 2025. Debate format, on the record, against the motion.

What I can run for your students

Session What students leave with Format
Building RAG systems that refuse to hallucinate A working retrieval pipeline with citations and a confidence gate 60 to 90 minute talk, or 3-hour hands-on workshop
Fine-tune an open LLM on a laptop budget A fine-tuned small model and an honest evaluation of it 3-hour workshop, students bring laptops
Vision, OCR and speech in real products How browser-side inference and privacy-by-design decisions get made 60 minute talk
From notebook to production Docker, CI, logging, metrics: the unglamorous part that gets you hired 60 minute talk or half-day bootcamp
What actually wins hackathons, and gets you placed Scoping, demo-first building, deploying publicly, writing about it 45 to 60 minute talk, works for first years
Starting a tech community on your campus Formats that work, formats that flop, from running TechVerse Enclave 45 minute talk plus Q&A

Also available for: hackathon judging and mentoring, on-site or remote. Placement prep: portfolio reviews and mock technical interviews for AI and ML roles. Guest lectures inside existing AI or ML courses. Office hours for final-year project teams.

How I run a session

  • No slide-only talks. Every session has a live system on screen and a repo students can open the same evening.
  • Real numbers. Memory limits, VRAM, test counts, what the API bill looks like. Students remember constraints, not adjectives.
  • One takeaway they can act on this week. Usually: ship the ugliest working version, deploy it publicly, write 500 words about what broke.

Logistics

  • Based in Kanpur. In person across Uttar Pradesh and Delhi NCR, remote anywhere.
  • Sessions for student communities and public colleges are free. Write to me about travel for in-person events.
  • Needs: a projector, HDMI, wifi. Workshops need students with laptops.
  • Two weeks' notice is ideal. Shorter works if the date is fixed.

How to invite me

Email pranjulrathour41@gmail.com with your college, the audience and its size, two or three date options, and the format you prefer from the table above. Or message me on LinkedIn.

Everything I write goes out on Dev.to, LinkedIn and Bluesky. The code is on GitHub. If you're a student and none of your clubs have invited a speaker this semester, forward this page to whoever runs them.

Pranjul Rathour · GenAI engineer, 3x hackathon winner, campus mentor · pranjulrathour41@gmail.com LinkedIn · Bluesky · GitHub · Dev.to

From my carousels
How to Invite a GenAI Speaker to Your College
How to Invite a GenAI Speaker to Your College, slide 1How to Invite a GenAI Speaker to Your College, slide 2
How to Invite a GenAI Speaker to Your College, slide 3How to Invite a GenAI Speaker to Your College, slide 4
Pranjul Rathour
Pranjul Rathour
GenAI engineer, Kanpur · 3x first-prize hackathon winner · campus mentor
I ship production RAG pipelines, fine-tune LLMs and build agentic AI products end to end. I lead engineering at SCULT INDIA for a 14-member team and have mentored 200+ students through TechVerse Enclave.
Open to: GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges.
On stage, at hackathons and on campus
Speaking at a MeetKats event
Speaking at a MeetKats event
Taking questions during a session
Taking questions during a session
At VSICS, Kanpur
At VSICS, Kanpur

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