Shaunak Lahiri
Shaunak Lahiri, head and shoulders, in a dark henley in front of a waterfall.
Pl. 0 · Shaunak Lahiri

Shaunak Lahiri

I’m Shaunak, a product-minded operator building purpose-driven products where product, operations and applied AI meet.

See the workDownload CVEmail me

Kolkata, India · Open to EU / Asia / both Americas

For PM, TPM, product ops, Founder's Office, forward-deployed and AI product roles.

Now

Now: Chaabi, a WhatsApp booking bot for independent Indian hotels, in Hindi and English. Still in the garage.

Building with the Chaabi Build team. It is not public yet, so there are no links or screenshots.

Education

IIT Mandi · applied AI/ML · BBA

2026Himachal Pradesh, India

PGD, Agentic Engineering (AI/ML)

Indian Institute of Technology, Mandi

  • Capstone medalist, 9.5/10, for Legal Navigator.
  • Football team lead.
  • Curated weekend campus trips across Himachal.

Legal Navigator case study

Jul 2023 – present

Independent Applied AI/ML

  • Legal Navigator: a voice-enabled RAG chatbot over NALSA legal-aid data that checks legal-aid eligibility with deterministic rules and answers in English or Hindi.
  • PickMyPics: send a picdump; it scores, ranks and captions the best shots, inside Telegram.
  • ProperPoker: Building an agent-native platform to centralize, analyze and report information across cardrooms.
  • Chaabi: a WhatsApp booking assistant for independent Indian hotels, in progress.

Legal NavigatorPickMyPics

Aug 2020 – Oct 2023

Bachelor of Business Administration

The Heritage Academy

  • Business Administration and Management.

Languages English, Spanish (conversational), Hindi, Bengali

IIT Mandi campus buildings spread across a forested hillside, with mountains behind

Field notes

IIT Mandi, 2026. Photos by Shaunak.

Notes fromMandi

01Campus on the hillside

02 / 12

  • View down a green Himalayan valley with buildings along the valley floor, framed by a tree branch
    02Looking down the valley
  • Shaunak, in a red Himachali cap, receiving a certificate on stage beneath a screen reading Closing Ceremony
    03Himshikhar 2026 closing ceremony
  • Students gathered at night on a campus lawn in front of a lit, curved hostel building
    04Night on the lawn
  • Multi-storey cream and red IIT Mandi administration building under a clear blue sky
    05Administration building
  • Tall white academic building with vertical red lettering on its side, against a blue sky
    06SCEE building
  • Main lawn with a curving path, an IIT Mandi sign and campus buildings against green hills
    07Main lawn
  • Grass lawn and footpath beside a long building, with the sun high in a bright sky
    08Lawn, midday
  • Wide view of a lawn, footpath and trees between campus buildings, hills behind
    09Between the blocks
  • Lawn with a basketball hoop, campus buildings and snow-dusted peaks in the distance
    10Lawn and the far peaks
  • Empty campus street running between buildings under large white clouds
    11Campus street
  • Sunset glowing behind hills and a building with a curved roof, a lamp post in front
    12Sunset, curved roof

Weekends off campus

TruTravel trip gallery coming soon.

  • Scooter handlebar and mirror on a mountain road curving along a hillside under clouds
    01On the road
  • Wooden cafe balcony looking out over a pine-covered valley at sunset
    02Cafe balcony, valley view
  • Stony riverbed with a bamboo clump, red plastic chairs and dogs resting in the shade
    03By the river

Career

four US companies, 2019–2023

Four years inside small US companies turning ambiguous, under-systemised operations into tools, processes and cadences that teams actually adopt. Since 2023, independent AI/ML study and builds, then a PGD in Agentic Engineering at IIT Mandi (2026). I have also started and shut several ventures of my own.

May 2021 – Jun 20232 years 2 monthsTexas, United States (remote)

The Cryo Helpers

Operations Manager

  • Took a near-SOP-less cryotherapy business and rolled out its operating system, tooling and weekly cadence.
  • ~5× revenue in a relatively short window on the back of the new tools, SOPs and cadence.
  • Highest-ROI hire, per the owner.
  • Built Chatbridge (2023) alongside the owner, Kristian Catalano: a webhook gate into receptionist agents, with a fallback to the client as the human respondent, built with Zapier, GoHighLevel and Twilio.

Cryo Helpers and Chatbridge case study

Apr 2020 – Jun 20203 months, contractTexas, United States

JZ Home Buyers

Operations Manager

  • Expansion planning, performance reviews, and leadership meetings.
More
  • Recruitment SOPs, interviews, and a cutover to new work-management software.
  • Staff one-to-ones, department plans, productivity tracking, and automation of slow admin work.

Jul 2019 – Sep 20193 monthsUnited States

Mirza Minds

Operations Manager

  • Brand operations for ThisCleans, Dinky, and related lines, including Fam Mirza's manager group.
More
  • Staffing, training, design/web, and PR with publishers and influencers.

Jan 2019 – Jun 20196 monthsUnited States

Social Media Expanders

Social Media Manager / Marketing Strategy

  • Marketing strategy, content, sales copy, and paid social for a law-firm client.

Founding

TruTravel

FounderComing soon

TruTravel

  • A way to reimagine the intersection between travel and technology: escaping the world of brokering and entering the world of creating communities.

More details and pictures on TruTravel coming soon.

TruTravel case studytrutravel.in (opens in a new tab)

Selected work

Three things I can show. Each tab opens the case: the problem, what I decided, the result, and what comes next.

01Team capstone

Legal Navigator

A voice-enabled RAG chatbot over NALSA legal-aid data: deterministic eligibility rules, answers in English or Hindi.

Capstone medal at IIT Mandi, 9.5/10.

Open the case

02Telegram bot

PickMyPics

Send a picdump; it scores, ranks and captions the best shots, inside Telegram.

The source is public on GitHub.

Open the case

03Founder

TruTravel

Where travel meets technology: out of brokering, into creating communities.

The live trutravel.in home page.

Live at trutravel.in.

Open the case

Stealth, in the garage

Not public yet. One line each, on purpose: no links, no screenshots.

Chaabi
A WhatsApp booking bot for Indian SMBs in hospitality. Not public yet.
ProperPoker
Building an agent-native platform to centralize, analyze and report information across cardrooms. Not public yet.

Service-as-a-Software

My point of view, in one flip. Software as a service asks the person using it to learn the tool and live with its learning curve. I want to turn that around.

Instead of handing a client one more product to learn, I build agents that run the task flow end to end for them. The client gets the outcome. The agents carry the software.

It is also why my builds live where people already are: PickMyPics inside Telegram, Chaabi inside WhatsApp. I treat AI as a product capability, not a bolt-on.

Got a task flow that should run itself? Tell me about it.

How I work

Discovery to delivery, in four moves. Each one points at the work that proves it.

Formal PM is new to me, and I want to learn it properly. The operating half of the job is not new.

  1. Frame the problem.

    At Cryo Helpers, the owner says I was “quick to learning the ins and outs of our niche”. I start with the people closest to the problem.

  2. Decide what matters.

    At JZ Home Buyers, that meant expansion planning, performance reviews and leadership meetings.

  3. Orchestrate the ship.

    Legal Navigator was a team build, from NALSA legal-aid documents to a bilingual, voice-enabled assistant: design, engineering and operations moving together.

  4. Measure, then iterate.

    At Cryo Helpers: new tools, SOPs and a weekly cadence, then ~5× revenue.

What I bring, and where it shows

Comfortable across a product team's range: framing the user problem, reading the metrics, and building the first working version.

Operations
Growth strategy, SOPs and operating cadence, Recruitment, Staff one-to-ones, Performance reviews, Admin automation.
Cryo Helpers, JZ Home Buyers
Commercial
Brand operations, Social content, Sales copy, Paid social, PR, Small-company staffing.
Mirza Minds, Social Media Expanders
AI systems
E2E architecture and systems design, RAG planning and embedding, On-prem and cloud language models, Agentic orchestration.
Legal Navigator, PickMyPics
Tools
Claude Code, Hermes, VS Code, Docker, GitHub, Tailscale, Cloudflare, InstaCloud, Cursor.
Used across the builds
Learning
Python, JavaScript, Node.
Labelled honestly: still learning

Ask the manual

The questions recruiters ask, answered only from what is on this site. Nothing is generated and nothing leaves your browser. If the manual does not know, it says so.

Has he shipped AI?

Yes. Independent applied AI/ML work since Jul 2023:

Legal Navigator: a voice-enabled RAG chatbot over NALSA legal-aid data that checks legal-aid eligibility with deterministic rules and answers in English or Hindi. His IIT Mandi team capstone, medalist 9.5/10; he was lead architect.

PickMyPics: send a picdump; it scores, ranks and captions the best shots, inside Telegram.

ProperPoker: Building an agent-native platform to centralize, analyze and report information across cardrooms. Not public yet.

Chaabi: a WhatsApp booking assistant for independent Indian hotels, in progress.

What employers & coworkers have to say

“I brought Shaunak into the team early 2021 as he had done great work at a company I was familiar with. At the time our company was struggling as we had close to zero SOP's or real management plan. Not only was Shaunak quick to learning the ins and outs of our niche he was able to get us set on track with the right tools and operation strategies that allowed us to 5x our revenue in a relatively short amount of time. Out of all my hires Shaunak by far provided the highest ROI.”
Kristian CatalanoOwner, The Cryo HelpersManaged Shaunak, 2021–2023
“I was particularly impressed with Shaunak's ability to command a room in our weekly Monday mornings even when being virtual. As a team member or a leader, Shaunak earns my highest recommendation.”
Harrison LinnVice President & Co-Owner, JZ Home BuyersSame team, 2020
“Shaunak is what I call a very rare find. I have had my own business for 6 years now and have studied leadership, management, and effectiveness from top to bottom during this time. Shaunak is someone who is incredibly detail oriented, timely, and precise with his work when it comes to managing projects, people, and deadlines. I am here to HIGHLY recommend this young man as I'm certain he can be a beneficial asset to any one or any company he works with in the future.”
Justin PetersManaged Shaunak at JZ Home Buyers2020
“I had the opportunity to work with Shaunak multiple different projects and he was exceptional. He's a great communicator and collaborator. He goes beyond necessary which I love the most about him. I definitely recommend him.”
Zaid ShahbazWorked with Shaunak on adjacent teamsPeer, 2020

Hiring? Write to me.

Kolkata, India · Open to EU / Asia / both Americas. Email is the fastest way in.

sh03ships@gmail.com
LinkedIn (opens in a new tab)
GitHub , modern-solver (opens in a new tab)
The CV, as a PDF or the printable page

Hiring for…

No mail app handy? Write to me here instead.