Shantanu Bal
Senior Software Engineer · Seattle → New York
10+ years building distributed, cloud-native systems at scale — most recently at Amazon and Axon. Now focused on applying that depth to financial technology.
Currently building Horizon, an AI-powered platform making financial market insights accessible to everyday investors — a direct expression of where I want the next chapter of my career to go.
My Journey So Far
I grew up in Chennai, South India, studied Computer Science there, and went on to earn a postgraduate diploma in management from IIM Ranchi and a Master's in Computer Science from USC in Los Angeles. I then spent nine years at Amazon — working across devices, Alexa, Prime Air, and Amazon Robotics — before joining Axon, where I've been building cloud infrastructure for vehicle intelligence. Now I'm drawn to the intersection of finance and technology, and building Horizon made that concrete. The next chapter is New York.
Personal Projects
AI-powered financial market insights platform covering stocks, options chains, economic indicators, bonds, currencies, and commodities. Built on Next.js 16, DynamoDB, ECS, and the Anthropic Claude API. Live at usehorizon.dev.
Social community platform for Seattle residents to discover local events, meetups, and make real-world connections. Full-stack Next.js app with authentication, payments, and AWS CDK infrastructure.
Real-time motion detection system on Raspberry Pi 5 using OpenCV. Captures images and video clips, uploads to AWS S3, and serves a live auto-refreshing web dashboard.
Work Experience
Designed cloud services that ingest, enrich, and store License Plate Recognition data streamed from edge devices. Built a multi-tenant indexing layer for fast search at scale and integrated real-time hotlist hit alerting pipelines.
Led the cloud data platform for Amazon Robotics, managing the full ML model lifecycle — training, dataset curation, continual retraining, deployment, and real-time performance monitoring — across fulfillment centers. Led a first-of-its-kind A/B testing infrastructure for robotic work cells.
Shipped production software across four orgs: Robotics (Python micro-services for robotic orchestration), Prime Air (drone delivery on amazon.com), Alexa (third-party developer monetization platform and EU launch in Germany), and Device Services (IoT device onboarding via Bluetooth with iOS/Android libraries).
Built Django web applications for customer-facing financial products.