Software Engineer, Security · Mercor
Pranav Aggarwal_
I build systems that have to tell the difference between people and problems. Right now that means fraud detection and identity infrastructure for a talent marketplace. Before that, it meant payment rails moving a large share of India's UPI volume. In between, I compete in algorithms for fun and maintain a privacy-first, on-device photo gallery.
Highlights
Selected work
Fraud engineering for a talent marketplace
Built the fraud and QA operations infrastructure for Mercor's matching system from zero, including detection, review workflows, and identity verification woven into onboarding, which cut on-platform fraud by roughly 70%. Also rebuilt resume parsing as OCR plus structured LLM extraction, and shipped an internal Slack bot so identity and QA checks stop living in a spreadsheet.
Keeping UPI's backbone honest at scale
Worked backend systems handling 90K+ transactions per second and roughly 47% of India's UPI volume. Designed Connchecker, a proactive connectivity and anomaly detection service, from scratch. It brought outage detection down to under five minutes, and I cut a critical configuration parsing path from 580ms to 3ms.
Teaching machines to see, without the cloud
Founded Pictopy, a privacy-first photo gallery with fully on-device face and object detection, grown to a repository of 90+ contributors. Mentored Google Summer of Code contributors on its architecture, CI, and ONNX Runtime inference stack across ten modules through Dec 2025.
Side projects
Things I've built
EmoPot
A Raspberry Pi Pico plant pot with a mood. Featured by Tom's Hardware, Adafruit, and Arduino.cc.
Resume parser
A spaCy/NLTK extractor for ATS-style structured candidate data. It's the same problem I later rebuilt with OCR and LLMs at Mercor.
Awesome Tables clone
An open-source global-search UI used daily by 900+ students, with a letter of appreciation from M.N. College.
Writing
Field notes
- Agent Engineering: A Field Guide
A field guide to agent engineering built from two production harnesses, their design paper, and a creator's own blog post.
Longer pieces live in docs; shorter ones in notes.
Contact
Get in touch
Email is the most reliable way to reach me. I'm also on GitHub, LinkedIn, and Twitter.
Full work history, education, and competitive-programming stats.
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