Pallavi Kochar (Jain)

MS Finance at UIUC | IIT Bombay

Champaign, Illinois, United States

About

I build production systems where software engineering, quantitative finance, and applied AI meet. My foundation is backend engineering. At Kotak Securities, one of India's largest brokerages, I spent 2.5 years building systems that processed 10K+ monthly transactions at 99.9% accuracy, shipped Kafka and AWS SQS streaming pipelines for real-time fraud detection, and automated workflows that saved hundreds of IT hours. I earned three promotions and the IT Champion Award along the way. I then deepened the quantitative side with an MS in Finance from UIUC (3.9 GPA), building on my BTech from IIT Bombay. My work spans derivatives pricing (Monte Carlo, Black-Scholes), risk modeling (GARCH, VaR, Expected Shortfall), and portfolio optimization. Most recently, I've been building agentic AI systems: multi-agent architectures, RAG pipelines with vector databases (Qdrant, LangChain), and MCP-based tooling. I designed an 11-agent stock recommendation engine in FastAPI, and a multi-agent trading system with a deterministic core that confines LLM agents to qualitative roles to prevent hallucination, an approach to reliability I care a lot about. What ties it together: I can build the system, model the math behind it, and make AI components reliable enough to ship. I'm looking for roles where that rare combination creates real value, in AI engineering, quant-engineering, or applied AI for financial systems.

Experience

  • University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (Part-time · 10 mos)
    • Graduate Course Assistant
      Jan 2026 - May 2026 · 5 mos

      Course: FIN 501 – Financial Economics

    • Research Assistant
      Jan 2026 - May 2026 · 5 mos

    • MSF Program Ambassador
      Aug 2025 - Dec 2025 · 5 mos

  • Kotak Securities (Full-time · 2 yrs 7 mos)
    • Senior Manager - IT Software
      Jun 2024 - Dec 2024 · 7 mos

      • Automated portfolio tracker processes, improving efficiency by 75% and saving 20+ IT hours weekly. • Developed multi-threaded C# .NET APIs for data migration, achieving 50% performance optimization. • Implemented SIP auto-debit system using SQL Server and C# APIs, streamlining payment processes.

    • Manager - IT Software
      Jun 2023 - Jun 2024 · 1 yr 1 mo

      • Awarded Kotak Securities IT Champion for H2 FY22-23. • Built a scalable AWS data pipeline for CRM (S3, Glue, Step Functions, RDS), enabling robust client data management.

    • Management Trainee
      Jun 2022 - Jun 2023 · 1 yr 1 mo

      • Designed 15+ stored procedures, enhancing data reliability and processing speed by 30%. • Optimized auto-debit process, increasing automation efficiency by 15%.

  • AI/ML Intern at FlexiEle
    May 2021 - Jun 2021 · 2 mos

    • Developed an AI chatbot using NLP to automate initial technical screenings.

  • Senior Convener, InSync at Indian Institute of Technology, Bombay
    Jul 2020 - May 2021 · 11 mos

  • Product Management Intern at Jio
    Nov 2020 - Dec 2020 · 2 mos

    • Customised features of the JioPhone Next, a flagship collaboration between Reliance Jio and Google, by conducting market surveys targeting new-to-internet users, and providing strategic recommendations for the device's launch