Nick Sawhney

I'm Nick Sawhney.

A New York based creative technologist, software engineer and event host, passionate about building cool things and making people happy, on screen and in a room full of people.

About

Nick Sawhney, smiling, in a grey suit and dark red tie, standing in front of a lake with autumn trees behind him.

I'm a 27-year-old software engineer. I like biking in the city, drinking cold brew, and hosting nights at bars around New York: DJ sets, karaoke, music bingo and trivia. I'm passionate about using technology to build things that solve interesting problems, make a social impact, and sometimes just to make people laugh.

These days I work on AI and backend systems at EvolutionIQ, where I built the backend and insights engine for our workers' compensation product: LLM extraction pipelines, data modeling, and the services around them.

Download CV nicksawhney@gmail.com

Work

  1. EvolutionIQ Dec 2023 – present

    Software Engineer, AI & Backend

    • Architected and built the backend and AI insights engine for the workers' compensation line of business from the ground up — LLM extraction pipelines, core business logic, database schema design and horizontal scaling.
    • Shipped production LLM pipelines that pull structured data out of complex insurance documents, cutting manual review time sharply.
    • Built and drove adoption of agentic tooling across the engineering team; acted as technical lead, product advisor and client-facing engineer with enterprise integration partners.

  2. Amazon 2022 – Dec 2023

    Software Development Engineer, FinTech

    • Built and maintained Java/AWS payment batching and transmission infrastructure moving over $1 trillion a year to business vendors globally.
    • Led international expansion into Turkey, the UAE, Egypt and Bahrain, each needing regulatory-aware architecture changes.
    • Designed a full-stack partner service health monitoring system, and rewrote on-call SOPs and ticket taxonomy to cut mean time to resolution.

  3. Urvin Finance 2020 – 2022

    Software Engineer, Simulation & Research

    • Built a heterogeneous-agent macroeconomic simulation library in Python from scratch, used for macro modeling and research.
    • Designed the Azure microservices architecture that ran the simulations, with Docker containers and inter-process message passing.
    • Co-authored a macroeconomics research paper based on the modeling and analysis of simulation outputs.

  4. NYU SMaPP Lab 2021

    Software Engineer, Data Visualization

    • Built a real-time and historical Twitter data visualization dashboard (Plotly, Flask, MongoDB, Pandas) to make the lab's data accessible to ML researchers.

  5. Skopos Labs 2019 – 2020

    Software Engineering & Data Science Intern

    • Built and maintained a financial simulation and ETL library for ML engineers, with automation pipelines on AWS EC2, SQL, Elasticsearch and Boto.
    • Managed junior interns and championed test-driven development with nose and pytest.

A few of my latest creations

Music Bingo

I host music bingo at bars around Brooklyn, and got tired of copy-pasting a few hundred songs into web forms every week. So I built a set of command line tools that take a round from a themed song list to a PDF of randomized, printable cards in two commands: one script pulls a Spotify playlist into a text file, another drives BingoBaker with Puppeteer to generate the cards. I use Claude to draft the themed lists, which is the slow part of planning a night. It's open source under MIT. See it on GitHub. 

node scripts/spotify.js get-playlist <playlist-url> --output round1.txt
node scripts/bingobaker.js create "Round 1 - Pop Divas" round1.txt

Bernie Sits

I made a website where people could put a picture of Bernie Sanders, sitting with his mittens on inauguration day, anywhere in the world with Google Maps street view. It went viral, hitting 9.8 million site requests in 4 days, and garnered some press attention as well. I immediately had 2 problems: scaling to meet the demand, and paying for the API requests to Google Maps. Luckily, I got in contact with some great engineers who taught me how to scale in real-time, and more than 7,000 people donated money to help pay for the costs. I learned a lot in this project, and hopefully gave some people a good meme along the way.

Here's a video I made sharing the story!

Fare Evasion

For my undergraduate thesis, I researched changes in fare evasion arrests in New York City's subway system as a result of new enforcement policies from the Manhattan District Attorney. For accessibility, I made an interactive map you can use to explore the data set I created for the paper. Feel free to click around! Read the paper here.

NYC Air Pollution

I noticed that I would cough a lot more during my commute when pollutant levels were high, so I did a brief survey of air quality in the city and its health impacts. This was one of my first projects about the city, and introduced me to the complexities of dealing with different types of map projections and geographic data. It's also a great example of how easy it is to turn around a project from NYC Open Data. Check out the jupyter notebook.

Choropleth map of New York City shaded by air pollutant concentration.

Press

Bernie Sits got picked up fairly widely in January 2021.

  • “Nick Sawhney, a software engineer in New York, created a tool that allows you to insert Mr. Sanders into any street address in Google Maps street view.”
    The New York Times Mike Ives and Daniel Victor
  • “Sawhney's creation, born out of a group chat with friends, added layers of personalization, ease of use, and absurdity.”
    Wired Brian Barrett
  • “It seems inevitable that a 22-year-old grad student would create the ultimate site to make the meme game much more accessible to anyone who isn't a whiz with Photoshop.”
    BuzzFeed News Ade Onibada
  • “The website, created by Nick Sawhney, asks for a zipcode or address and then puts Sanders in that neighborhood using Google Maps.”
    Insider Max Kalnitz

Education

New York University, College of Arts & Science

BA in Computer Science, Economics & Politics Class of 2020 GPA 3.87 Magna Cum Laude

During my undergraduate career, I studied politics, game theory, international relations, and data science. This culminated in my thesis, a quantitative analysis of the role of policing in the NYC subway system. Beyond academics, I had the great pleasure of serving as General Manager of WNYU Radio 89.1 FM, where I hosted Weekly Refresh, a technology news talk show.

Say hello

I'd love to talk about anything! Feel free to reach out :)

nicksawhney@gmail.com GitHub LinkedIn