Srinila Pogalla

I started in AI and data science out of curiosity — it was new, exciting, and full of possibility. I pursued a Bachelor of Engineering in Artificial Intelligence & Data Science at Stanley College of Engineering and Technology in Hyderabad, and somewhere along the way that curiosity became the foundation of everything I build today.

I made my way to the U.S., first to Florida Atlantic University and then to the University of North Dakota, drawn by research opportunities here. Grand Forks has been an unexpected home — the community, the people at UND, and the collaborative culture have shaped both the work and the person doing it.

Joining the Computational Research Center at UND was a turning point. I came in without a formal software engineering background and built my way up through hands-on work: full-stack development, MLOps, and production-deployed systems on a U.S. Department of Defense-funded Arctic research project. Outside of that role, I've independently built projects across NLP, RAG systems, agentic AI, ETL pipelines, and analytics warehouses.

Today I sit at the intersection of engineering and research — someone who can ship a containerized API and care about why a retrieval model underperforms on edge cases. I'm actively looking for roles in AI Engineering, Data Engineering, and Data Science where both of those things matter.