Hi, I'm Vishal — Software Engineer turned AI Data Engineer, building toward the UK

#datascience #ai #career #webdev

If you're seeing this profile for the first time, here's the short version of who I am and what I'm doing here.

I'm a Software Engineer based in Ahmedabad, India, with an MSc in Computer Science (Distinction) from Birmingham City University, UK. My background is backend development — REST APIs, Laravel, Python — but over the last couple of years I've moved deliberately into AI and data engineering, and I'm now building toward something bigger: a PhD in speech and multimodal AI, and eventually, a return to the UK.

Why I'm writing this

I've learned almost everything I know from things other people wrote, built, and shared publicly for free. Tutorials, open source code, random blog posts at 2am that solved a problem I'd been stuck on for hours. None of that existed because someone was forced to write it. It existed because someone decided to give something back.

I'd like to do the same. Writing here, sharing what I build, and being open about what I'm learning is my small way of putting something into the same pool I've taken so much from.

What I actually work on

Python backend development — APIs, automation, data processing
Data engineering — pipelines, Airflow, dbt, SQL
AI/LLM applications — LangChain, RAG systems, OpenAI integrations
Speech and NLP — the research side, rooted in my MSc dissertation on voice-to-voice machine translation, which my supervisor flagged as having publication potential

Alongside this, I'm preparing a PhD application to UK universities for speech and multimodal AI, and working toward the UK Global Talent Visa — so expect some posts about that journey too, not just code.

What I'm hoping to find here

Conversations, mostly. If you're working in data engineering, AI, or speech research — or you've gone through a PhD application or the UK Global Talent Visa yourself — I'd genuinely like to hear from you. And if something I write helps even one person the way a random blog post once helped me, that's the whole point.

Thanks for reading this far. More coming soon.
— Vishal

📧 iamparmarvk@gmail.com · 🔗 linkedin.com/in/iamparmarvk · 💻 github.com/iamparmarvk · https://vishparmar.com/