Pryce Tharpe
Professional Experience
Mesh Systems
Carmel, IN
Software Engineer Intern
Rotated through Cloud, Mobile & DevOps teams on AI enablement, automation, and feature development.
AI System Prompt & Internal Enablement Platform
Jun -- Aug 2025- Developed a master IDE prompt that standardized AI-assisted coding workflows across the company.
- Built internal GPT-based tools and facilitated 17 short enablement sessions (AI 101/workshops) for 20+ engineers across multiple teams, standardizing AI usage across the org.
Azure DevOps Sprint Scorecard Extension
Jun -- Aug 2025- Designed and delivered an Azure DevOps extension with real-time sprint dashboards for project tracking.
- Converted a static HTML prototype into a production-ready React/Next.js solution, integrating backend data from a junior intern's service.
Financial Report Automation
May -- Jun 2025- Designed and launched an automated ETL pipeline with Microsoft Fabric and SQL, cutting monthly Azure reporting from 3 hours to under 10 minutes.
Academic & Personal Projects
ECE 46100 - Software Engineering --- Package Registry System
Aug -- Dec 2025- Designed complete AWS deployment infrastructure (ECS/Fargate, ECR, S3, CloudWatch) with CI/CD pipeline using GitHub Actions and OIDC authentication.
- Implemented LLM-based evaluation metrics for performance claims and reproducibility assessment.
Senior Design --- Smart Glasses GenAI Subsystem
Aug -- Dec 2025- Built FastAPI microservice with retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipeline using Qdrant vector store, multi-provider LLM abstraction (Ollama/GenAI API), and three-layer context system.
- Designed REST endpoints for educational artifact generation (flashcards, MCQs); integrated with Node.js backend and React/React Native frontends.
SimRAG Reproduction - RAG Fine-Tuning Study
Aug - Dec 2025- Reproduced NAACL 2025 SimRAG methodology on consumer hardware; implemented two-stage QLoRA fine-tuning with 4-bit quantization and built evaluation framework establishing model capacity lower bounds for RAG effectiveness.
MY-AI - Personal AI Assistant
Aug 2025 - Present- Building privacy-first AI assistant with RAG, document knowledge bases, and extensible tool integration supporting local (Ollama) or cloud LLMs.
- Implemented unified provider interface, Qdrant vector storage with cited retrieval, and tool framework with registry and allowlist security.
Portfolio Website
May 2025 - Present- Built with Next.js 15, React 19 Server Components, and TypeScript with live Spotify integration via Python scripts and GitHub Actions.
Additional Experience
Purdue Rack and Roll
West Lafayette, IN
Managed daily operations and customer experience in a high-responsibility, two-person setting.
Royal Pin Woodland
Indianapolis, IN
Trained 5+ new hires, led 2--4-person teams, and supervised a 70-lane center during peak hours.
Education
Purdue University
West Lafayette, IN
Bachelor of Science in Computer Engineering
Current Coursework: Software Engineering, Machine Learning, Software Senior Design
Skills
Technical: Python, C/C++, React, Next.js, TypeScript, AWS (ECS, ECR, S3, CloudWatch, IAM), Docker, CI/CD (GitHub Actions), Azure DevOps, Microsoft Fabric, SQL, FastAPI, RAG Systems, LLM Integration, Prompt Engineering, Git/GitHub, pytest