Samarth Zalte

About

Founding/back-end engineer and research engineer working across fintech systems and AI/ML pipelines. Built FastAPI/Postgres backends and React dashboards, containerized services with Docker/Kubernetes, and deployed REST APIs to AWS. Currently fine-tuning text-to-image models with LoRA (PyTorch + Hugging Face Diffusers) and building evaluation workflows. Also built distributed MQTT+Kafka telemetry ingestion and alerting APIs with monitoring dashboards (Grafana).

Experience

• Research Engineer · USC Information Sciences Institute08-01-2025 – 03-31-2026

  • Fine-tuned FLUX text-to-image models in Python with LoRA using PyTorch and Hugging Face Diffusers for controlled image generation experiments • Prepared training datasets by cleaning images, editing captions, filtering bad samples, and generating metadata files for model runs • Ran experiments across LoRA rank, learning rate, training steps, batch size, and prompt sets to compare output quality • Built evaluation sheets with generated samples, prompt adherence notes, visual artifacts, and checkpoint comparisons for researcher review.

• Software Engineer Intern · Elliot Systems06-01-2025 – 08-31-2025

  • Built a distributed MQTT + Kafka pipeline to ingest real-time energy telemetry from 200+ industrial sensors, reducing data latency by 60% • Developed a Python Django REST API exposing per-device energy metrics and anomaly alerts, deployed on AWS Elastic Beanstalk with role-based access control • Created Grafana dashboards for monitoring machine energy consumption, abnormal usage patterns, and possible optimization opportunities

• Founding Engineer · Cruize Finance10-01-2021 – 07-31-2024

  • Sole backend engineer for 8 months. Built payments, signup, and identity verification (KYC) and portfolio balances on FastAPI + Postgres. • Built React dashboards for internal teams to review customers, investigate transactions, and resolve failed or incomplete account flows • Containerized backend services with Docker and Kubernetes, supporting zero-downtime releases as the platform grew to 10K users

Education

• University of Southern CaliforniaMaster of Science, Electrical and Computer Engineering
• Maharashtra Institute of TechnologyBachelor of Technology, Electronics and Communications Engineering

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