# Home (/)

## Hero

- Vivek Vellaiyappan Surulimuthu
- Senior Software Development Engineer | AI/ML Engineer
- "Engineer. Dreamer. Empowering humans through tech."

Engineer spanning AI, Platform Engineering, and Developer Experience, driven by using technology to solve real-world problems and empower human lives. I build solutions that bridge innovation with measurable business impact from enterprise AI agents contributing to $98M opportunities to open-source tools with 470+ GitHub stars.

## What I Do

### 🤖 AI & Intelligent Systems

- Skills: AI Agents, RAG, LangGraph, LLM Integration, AI Evals, Prompt Engineering, MCP
- Highlight: Built AI agent: 10min → 30sec incident resolution

### 💻 Full Stack Development

- Skills: React, TypeScript, Node.js, Python, GraphQL, REST APIs
- Highlight: Reusable chatbot component for enterprise design systems

### 🔧 Platform Engineering & DevEx

- Skills: E2E Testing, Playwright, Kubernetes, CI/CD, Docker, Infrastructure
- Highlight: Framework adopted by 120+ devs, 30+ teams

### 🎤 Thought Leadership

- Skills: Conference Speaking, Research, Open Source, Technical Mentorship
- Highlight: AI Summit NYC 2025 panelist · arXiv published

## Career Journey

### Current

- Company: [Expedia Group](https://www.expediagroup.com)
- Role: Senior Software Development Engineer | AI/ML Engineer
- Period: 2021 - Present

- Leading Vrbo partner virtual assistant migration to modern AI agent platform (3 engineers, 4+ teams)
- LLM pipeline compresses partner onboarding from 45 to 120 minutes down to under 10 minutes
- $98M AI opportunity (KAI chatbot)
- $8-40M projected savings (FBI Engine)
- AI Agent Incident Analyzer: 10min → 30sec, CTO demo
- 740+ weekly users (browser extension)
- 120+ developers, 30+ teams (E2E framework)
- 2× MVP Awards (Q4'24, Q1'25)
- $273K+ proven savings
- AI Hackathon Winner (87 teams)

### Previous

- Company: [Tesla](https://www.tesla.com/about)
- Role: Full Stack Developer Intern
- Period: 2019

- $1.2M/year savings via quality automation system

- Company: [athenahealth](https://www.athenahealth.com)
- Role: Member of Technical Staff
- Period: 2019 - 2021

- Healthcare scheduling platform

- Company: [Marist College](https://www.marist.edu)
- Role: MS Computer Science
- Period: 2017 - 2019

- Student Developer at Digital Education Dept

## Featured Insights

- [How MCP Standardizes Agent Workflows (mcp-pandoc example)](https://medium.com/@vivekvells/how-mcp-standardizes-agent-workflows-a-practical-example-with-mcp-pandoc-server-0294dd84f092) (Medium • Article • AI Agents & MCP • Aug 2025) — A practical MCP breakdown using mcp-pandoc to show tools, memory, and repeatable agent workflows.
- [Expose Any MCP Server as a Web API](https://medium.com/@vivekvells/expose-any-mcp-server-as-a-web-api-acefb2224380) (Medium • Article • AI Agents & MCP • Aug 2025) — Wrap a local MCP server with Express and expose it safely over the internet for remote clients.
- [Text to Action (Part 4): Wake Word Detection → Calendar Events](https://medium.com/@vivekvells/part-4-text-to-action-wake-word-detection-to-calendar-events-building-a-smart-calendar-ai-81883573dbdd) (Medium • Article • AI Tutorials • May 2025) — Build a hands-free assistant that turns “Hey Calendar” voice commands into Google Calendar events.
- [mcp-pandoc v1: Document Format Conversion for Claude (MCP server)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vN3VOb0rygM) (YouTube • Video • AI Agents & MCP • Dec 2024) — Demo of using an MCP server for seamless document conversion workflows.
- [Text to Action (Part 4): Wake Word → Calendar Events (Video)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=99eck-j7AxI) (YouTube • Video • AI Tutorials • May 2025) — Wake word detection + continuous listening to schedule calendar events with voice commands.
- [Guardian Sight: Privacy Simplified (Gemini Nano)](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qRX8E6qNcy8) (YouTube • Video • Browser AI • Dec 2024) — A browser-focused AI build using Chrome’s built-in Gemini Nano capabilities.

## Open Source, Research & Speaking

### Open Source

- [mcp-pandoc](https://github.com/vivekVells/mcp-pandoc) — Document Conversion Model Context Protocol Server (470+ stars, 13K+ downloads/month)
- [cag-js](https://github.com/vivekVells/cag-js) — Context expansion for browser-based AI models
- [cag-js-playground](https://github.com/vivekVells/cag-js-playground) — Playground to validate & experiment with cag-js library

### Research

- [CAG: Chunked Augmented Generation](https://arxiv.org/abs/2412.18708) — Novel architecture overcoming Chrome's Gemini Nano context window limitations (arXiv 2024)

### Speaking

- [The AI Summit New York 2025](https://newyork.theaisummit.com/speakers/vivek-vellaiyappan-surulimuthu) — AI That Delivers: Cross-Industry Lessons from Real-World Impact (Panelist • December 10-11, 2025)
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/posts/vivekvellaiyappans_aisummitnyc-ai-machinelearning-activity-7405092078352896000-IXQd