Girwan Dhakal

ShiptData Science Intern — AI Platform · Jun 2026 - Aug 2026

Shipt, Data Science Intern — AI Platform · Jun 2026 - Aug 2026: Built a LangGraph RAG agent for AI/ML engineers to search internal documentation and manage infrastructure configurations, cutting onboarding and internal support time by 50%. Developed a Gemini-based OCR pipeline on GCP and Snowflake for previously unprocessed shopper receipts, identifying $10K in projected annual vendor savings while expanding tax-recovery coverage to 99%. Tuned Shipt’s product substitution-ranking model with Optuna, lifting Recall@K by 20%. Alabama Life Research Institute, Machine Learning Researcher · Jan 2025 - Present: First-authored a research paper applying machine learning to childhood language development across 60K+ child utterances from multiple longitudinal speech corpora, now submitted for peer review. Fine-tuned Google FLAN-T5 on 90K utterances to reduce word error rate from 17.2 to 14.4, and benchmarked DeiT, Swin Transformer, and skeleton-based models on 7 hours of child interaction video for gesture classification. Alabama Credit Union, Data Analyst Co-op · Aug 2025 - May 2026: Automated recurring workflows with Power Automate, eliminating 16 hours of manual reporting every month. Built and deployed 5 Power BI dashboards with business stakeholders and led weekly user training, increasing dashboard adoption by 50%. Optimized Microsoft SQL Server ETL pipelines to cut daily refresh time by 30%, delivering fresher data downstream. RoomiCheck, Technical Lead · Dec 2025 - Present: Leading engineering on a roommate-matching platform for housing providers, and secured $2,500 in non-dilutive funding through RiverPitch 2025 and the 2026 Aldag Entrepreneurship Competition. Built and deployed a FastAPI adaptive questionnaire that uses LLMs to turn free-text answers into structured roommate profiles, piloted with 50+ users.