RAKESH SHAH

COO & Co-Founder

• Building CodeValid to make software development faster, easier, and more reliable — an AI-native platform that continuously verifies APIs, web applications, and AI agents against evolving business requirements.
• As COO, I run operations, customer discovery, go-to-market, and company execution — not just the product roadmap.
• Leading product vision and strategy, and platform design to improve code quality and help teams catch issues earlier.
• Developing spec-driven testing, requirement traceability, automated API validation, functional test generation, regression analysis, and agent testing.

Senior Software Engineer Lead

• Maintain and enhance Sea-Bird applications while migrating legacy tools to modern stacks, and consolidating small utilities into unified, maintainable modules.
• Evaluate and integrate ML/LLM capabilities into existing Sea-Bird workflows, including K2 processing.
• Develop automated testing, regression testing, and validation for software and instrument workflows.
• Diagnose complex software, calibration, data-processing, and integration issues, and work with engineering, support, and product teams to turn instrument requirements into software.
• Build internal tooling that improves engineering productivity, and explore agents for ticket routing, troubleshooting, and documentation.
• Develop a Sea-Bird MCP server and internal assistant that can interact with tools, documentation, and workflows — using AI to make legacy code and domain knowledge more accessible.

Staff Software Engineer

Lead Software Engineer

• Led a team of three developers to design and build the Food System web application for practitioners and educators using React and Node.js.
• Project Lead for Data Science for Public Good (DSPG), including 2023’s “Local Food Systems & AI” and 2022’s “AgMRC Commodity Reports.”
• Mentored DSPG teams and interns through pair programming, developer community events, and mod sessions.
• Built reporting tools for Data for Decision Makers, Retail Trade, and IGFI using PHP, and a housing readiness assessment project with Python and AI models for housing quality, affordability, and access.
• Replaced obsolete production workflows with CI/CD pipelines, improving usability and delivering projects weeks earlier.
• Collaborated on the Indicators web application to consolidate program offerings for local decision-makers.

Software Development Intern

• Created multiuser interaction in the immersive environment inside Teamcenter Visualization.
• Improved teleportation and menu interaction in VR using OpenGL.
• Integrated Oculus Rift and HTC Vive with an in-house graphics engine to render 3D models, and benchmarked rendering performance against competing products.

Graduate Researcher & Teaching Assistant

• Virtual Reality Application Developer (GRA): built a virtual restaurant to study eating behavior and a CAVE VR experience for stress-free chicken growth research.
• Graduate Research Assistant: created scenes and levels for Meta!Blast, a 3D biology learning game in Unity.
• Teaching Assistant for Virtual Reality and its Applications (HCI / ME 580), Introduction to Spreadsheet and Database (COMS 113), and Problem Solving in Software Engineering (SE 185).

Software Development Engineer

• Led a five-person team to build the 42hertz Reporting Service using C# and Microsoft Dynamics AX, cutting report generation time by about 50%.
• Enabled users with basic HTML and CSS knowledge to build and publish customized reports in a template store.
• Received the Key Talent Recognition Award in 2015 (2 of 50 engineering team members).

Software Design Engineer

• Designed user interactions, workflows, data integration, and front-end applications for the Omni Output Management System (Customer Communication Management Suite).