Manas Nikam

Manas Nikam, forward deployed engineer

I make AI work inside existing systems.

I'm Manas Nikam, a forward deployed engineer in Mumbai, remote for a Canadian client since May 2023. 8+ years wiring payments, suppliers and CRMs, now wiring LLM agents into them; my JonView integration took a supplier booking from about 10 minutes to about 30 seconds.

  • 30+providers behind one payments interface
  • 10 min to 30 sper supplier booking
  • 3 agents, 3 dayson Cloud Run, 2 over vendor MCP servers

Live agentready.prescalesystems.workers.dev WebMCP readiness benchmark, built and submitted September 2026

Read the case studies Download the resume (PDF)

01

Case studies

Three engagements, three numbers, and what I would do differently on each.

The AI I ship goes into systems customers already run: Gemini OCR on a printer-services company's live invoice flow, with a spend cap and a per-invoice cost line, built on the same integration habits I used for 30+ payment providers.

Structured outputs, MCP clients, a SHA-256 verifier for model claims, a 95%-confidence-interval eval runner and a per-invoice cost line: the parts around the model are the work.

10 min to 30 sper supplier booking, JonView

Client work

Integrating VIA Rail and JonView into a tour operator's booking system

Three travel suppliers wired into a live itinerary system for Fresh Tracks Canada: JonView search and booking with a circuit breaker and state sync, VIA Rail built end to end in five dated steps, a Rocky Mountaineer scraper. Per-product booking time went from about 10 minutes to about 30 seconds.

Stack Python, Django, Django REST Framework, PostgreSQL, Redis, WebSockets, AWS ECS, GitHub Actions, Salesforce, SonarQube

10 instanceshard cap on Vertex OCR; cost logged per invoice

Client work

Gemini invoice OCR and automated Tally invoicing for a printer-fleet business

Live for CD Infoware, an Indian printer-services company: invoice OCR on Gemini through Vertex AI with a 10-instance cap and per-invoice cost in USD and INR, plus a nightly Konica Minolta meter scrape that drafts one Tally-format GST invoice per device per month. 111 commits, all mine.

Stack TypeScript, React 19, Vite, Tailwind, React Native, Firebase, Vertex AI, Gemini, Puppeteer, Playwright, pnpm, Turborepo

3 in 3 daysagents on Cloud Run, 2 over vendor MCP servers

Hackathon build

Three agents on Cloud Run in three days, two integrated with vendor MCP servers

3 production agents on Cloud Run in 3 days, 2 integrated with vendor MCP servers (ClickHouse, Grafana): a screenplay clearance pipeline, a retention analyst over mcp-clickhouse, and a VFX war-room agent over mcp-grafana that writes back annotations and incidents. Each live with a demo video. Built and submitted; outcome not recorded.

Stack Python, Google ADK, Gemini 2.5, Vertex AI, FastAPI, Cloud Run, MCP, ClickHouse, Grafana, Prometheus, Loki, OpenTelemetry

All case studies

02

How I work

Six habits, each with a file you can open.

  1. I write the spec before the code, and get it approved.

    PostgreSQL fleet monitoring spec approved 23 July 2026, before the build. Thane Municipal deployment from a feasibility study approved 21 August 2026. Telematics design dated 16 September, revised 17 September 2026.

  2. I record reversals instead of hiding them.

    A Go and Cloudflare telematics design was completed, reviewed, then discarded for an all-Rust single-VPS design; the 34 fixture packets and review findings carried forward.

  3. I cap spend before the first real request.

    Vertex OCR runs at most 10 instances so a bulk upload cannot run unbounded paid calls; every invoice records its token cost in USD and INR. AgentReady has a daily run budget and payload caps. The desktop automation agent ships with a cost table ($0 idle, about $6 a month at 10 tasks a day).

  4. A human signs off by default.

    Supplier-coordination agents route drafts through Teams Adaptive Cards for approval (designed and prototyped). QuoteDesk drafts a margin-loaded quote for a human to send. Proofline’s auditor accepts or rejects each mapping and that tunes the mapper. CD Infoware generates draft invoices, not final ones.

  5. Docs ship with a CI check, or they rot.

    A CI job fails the CD Infoware build if the 12-chapter docs book’s code citations drift. The same docs-citation workflow runs on the react-native-fused-call package.

  6. I verify what the model says instead of trusting it.

    Proofline’s verifier re-fetches every source and compares SHA-256 so hallucinated evidence is rejected. provenance-grade labels each extracted field verified, asserted or assumed. AgentReady records CAPTCHAs and logins as failures, never bypasses them, and labels its synthetic rows.

03

Where I have shipped

The stack changes; the shape does not: one interface per provider, explicit failure modes, a reconciliation path, a spend cap; I have built that shape for payments, travel suppliers and now LLM tools.

Payments2018 to 2023
A Django payment gateway with processor failover, then a fintech marketplace wired to 30+ providers at 20,000+ transactions a day, leading a team of five.
Banking2019 to 2020
5 of 10 legacy Struts apps moved to Spring Boot and Angular in 10 months against an 18-month plan.
Travel2023 to now
VIA Rail, JonView and Rocky Mountaineer integrations, Salesforce sync, Flywire payments, and a Postgres fleet monitor I designed, built and documented alone.
Field operations and AI2026
Invoice OCR, a nightly meter scrape that drafts GST invoices in Tally format, a Rust telematics design for Teltonika and AIS-140 devices, and hackathon agents on ADK, MCP and WebMCP.

Open source: an Android geolocation module with 109 Robolectric and 16 Jest tests, dogfooded in a client app.

Hackathon builds are where I test new tooling on a deadline; client builds are where it earns its keep; both are on this site, labelled.

04

Contact

I am looking for a forward deployed engineer role at an AI-native company. Remote from Mumbai on North American hours.

8+ years integrating messy business systems; now integrating AI agents into them.

Read the case studiesDownload the resume (PDF)

Email manasnikam24@gmail.comGitHubLinkedIn