Ishita Rai

Graduate Research Assistant @ Penn Medicine, University of Pennsylvania Health System

About

I’m a Software Engineer and M.S.E. student in Computer and Information Science at the University of Pennsylvania, with prior experience building production systems at JPMorgan Chase in a time- and accuracy-critical electronic trading environment. My work has spanned full-stack product development, backend services, and AI-powered systems, with a focus on building reliable, scalable tools that improve user workflows and decision-making. At JPMorgan, I built and scaled React, Flask, and GraphQL systems used by 500+ global users, reduced data-update latency from nearly an hour to minutes, improved page-load performance by 96%, and developed backend services for real-time trading workflows. I’ve also worked on observability, reliability, and fault-tolerant systems, including tooling that reduced root-cause analysis time by 60% and recovery mechanisms that helped prevent $80K+ in potential losses. Alongside industry work, I’m building depth in AI and research through projects in LLM applications, RAG, graph machine learning, NLP, and recommendation systems. My recent work includes an LLM-based adaptive survey system, large-scale graph learning for community detection, and NLP pipelines for information extraction research contributing to an IEEE publication. I’m especially interested in software and research problems at the intersection of AI, user experience, personalization, ranking, learning systems, and large-scale product engineering, particularly where strong modeling, thoughtful interfaces, and measurable impact come together.

Country

City

United States

Industry

Computer Software

Skill

Software Design, Research Design, Data Preparation, Research Collaboration, Data Analysis, Microsoft Excel, Artificial Intelligence (AI), Distributed Systems, Knowledge Engineering, Large Language Models (LLM), Hugging Face Products, Java, Web Interface Design, Front-End Development, FIX Protocol, Flask, TypeScript, JavaScript, Natural Language Processing (NLP), React.js

Experience

Graduate Research Assistant

Penn Medicine, University of Pennsylvania Health System

2026-5 - 2026-5 · 1 mo

Philadelphia, PA

Graduate Teaching Assistant

University of Pennsylvania

2026-1 - 2026-5 · 5 mos

TA for CIS 5110: Theory of Computation Beta Tester for EAS 5720: Design Thinking for Engineering Innovation

Software Engineer

JPMorganChase

2023-8 - 2025-8 · 2 yrs 1 mo

Mumbai

Worked on production systems within the FX eTrading platform, building full-stack applications, backend services, and data workflows used by global trading teams in time- and accuracy-critical environments. - Engineered and scaled a React, Flask, and GraphQL production platform used by 500+ global users, reducing data-update latency from ~1 hour to minutes - Migrated a legacy trade-update system to modern React and Java micro-frontends, improving page-load performance by 96% and driving full user adoption - Built low-latency Java microservices and fault-tolerant APIs for real-time FX trading workflows supporting 10K+ daily order events across 3 asset classes - Architected audit-safe workflows and notification pipelines for trade customization updates, ensuring 100% compliance, traceability, and reliable data lineage across downstream systems - Built Python- and Splunk-based observability workflows that reduced issue investigation and root-cause analysis time by 60% - Designed a replay framework to recover lost downstream messages during transmission failures, preserving data consistency and preventing $80K+ in potential trading losses - Spearheaded modernization of a TypeScript UI codebase that lagged 10 major versions behind, improving maintainability and reliability; presented the upgrade at the Global Markets Technology UI Showcase

Software Engineering Intern

JPMorganChase

2022-6 - 2022-7 · 2 mos

Mumbai

Built internal tools to improve debugging, observability, and developer productivity across distributed systems. -Developed a Flask-based microservice dependency visualization tool, reducing production debugging and root-cause analysis time by 80% -Built a Hugging Face-powered FAQ system, improving response accuracy by ~25% through prompt and retrieval improvements -Improved internal visibility into service dependencies and production workflows for distributed backend systems

Student Placement Coordinator

KJ Somaiya College of Engineering, Vidyavihar

2021-6 - 2022-7 · 1 yr 2 mos

Coordinated placement-related activities across students and employers, supporting career outreach and student engagement initiatives

Research Assistant Intern

KJ Somaiya College of Engineering, Vidyavihar

2021-2 - 2021-5 · 4 mos

Mumbai

- Conducted literature survey of ML/CNN-based breast cancer detection approaches. - Compiled, cleaned, and structured datasets for comparative analysis and experimentation. - Produced organized documentation summarizing datasets, evaluation setups, and prior methodologies.

Research Assistant Intern

KJ Somaiya College of Engineering, Vidyavihar

2020-2 - 2021-5 · 1 yr 4 mos

- Built NLP preprocessing pipelines for 100K+ text samples using CoreNLP, NLTK, and spaCy, enabling large-scale information extraction and machine reading experiments - Designed annotation and feature extraction workflows for semantic relationship modeling - Contributed pipeline design and experimental analysis to IEEE-published research on predicate modeling and information extraction

Education

University of Pennsylvania

Computer and Information Sciences, Artificial Intelligence

2025-8 - 2027-5 · 1 yr 10 mos

Spring 2026: MKTG 7120: Data Analytics for Marketing Decisions (Wharton) CIS 7000: Foundations and Frontiers of Human Computer Interaction CIS 5480: Operating Systems Fall 2025: CIS 5120: Artificial Intelligence CIS 5020: Machine Learning CIS 5180: Computer Vision