Hi, I’m Utsav Shekhar, a final year B.Tech (Hons) CS + MS in Computational Linguistics student at IIIT Hyderabad, working at the intersection of AI research and large-scale ML systems. I’ve interned at Amazon (Applied Science) and IBM Research, where I worked on LLM systems, agentic AI frameworks, and production-scale ML pipelines, and received Pre Placement Offers from both organizations. I am currently working as a Causal Inference Intern at Sony Research. My research work on multimodal analysis of protest songs using NLP and audio models was accepted at ACL 2025, one of the top conferences in Natural Language Processing. Over the last few years, I’ve worked on: • Large-scale ML systems used in production • LLM agents and retrieval pipelines • Multimodal AI (text + audio) • Research leading to top-tier conference publications Through Topmate, I aim to help students and early engineers who want to: • Break into AI/ML internships and research labs • Build strong ML / LLM projects • Navigate research publications and grad-school style work • Prepare for Applied Scientist / ML roles at top tech companies If you're trying to build a strong AI/ML profile or break into top research and industry internships, I’d be happy to share the strategies and lessons that worked for me