From a BCA in Kanpur to GenAI engineer: how I got here, what actually mattered, and what I would tell my first-year self

Can you become a GenAI engineer from a BCA at a college nobody has heard of?

Yes. I did a Bachelor of Computer Applications at Dr. Virendra Swarup Institute of Computer Studies in Kanpur, 2023 to 2026, and by the first half of 2026 I had shipped five production AI systems as a GenAI engineer and was leading engineering for a 14-member team at SCULT INDIA. Not one interview that mattered asked about the college. Every one asked about what I had built and what broke. This page is the path, without the parts that make it sound inevitable.

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The full resume with dates is on the portfolio [1]. What follows is the version with the decisions in it.

The certificate says BCA, Kanpur. The GitHub says five production AI apps, three first prizes, a 14-member team. Recruiters read the second document first when you give them a reason to. Pranjul Rathour

What did the first year look like?

Foundations, and a community that did not exist yet. In 2023 I started the BCA and started TechVerse Enclave, a developer community that began as a place for a few of us to learn web development together and became, over three years, a 500-plus member community where I have mentored more than 200 students. The first year was Python, JavaScript, Git, one deployed page, and the habit of teaching what I had learned the week before.

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That roadmap is the one I gave 100+ first-years at the VSICS induction in July 2025, because it is the one that worked, not the one that sounds impressive [8].

How did the community change things?

More than anything else. TechVerse Enclave started as a hackathon team and a group chat and became the place where I learned to teach, to organise, to run sessions and to be known for something. Mentoring 200 students meant answering the same questions until I understood them properly. The sessions I ran inside the community became the sessions colleges invited me to give. The people in it became teammates, clients and referrals. Every later opportunity traces back to it.

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The story of the first 500 members, with what worked and what did not, is written up separately [4]. The short version: the community did not grow because I promoted it; it grew because sessions happened every week whether five people or fifty showed up.

What did hackathons teach that classes did not?

Scope, demos and losing. Three first prizes: Changethon 2025 at the National Social Summit, IIT Roorkee, with KrishGyan, voice-first farming advice over WhatsApp; Product Genesis at Vividhotsava 2025, CSJMU Kanpur, with BrandHive; and BYTEBATTLE by MeetKats, with Annapurna, surplus food coordination. A top-three at IIT Kanpur. And STROT, which we did not win, because we built more and explained less than the team that did. The loss is the one I quote most in talks.

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Everything I now teach about hackathon strategy comes from those four rooms [5].

How did the first clients and SCULT INDIA happen?

Through the community and through shipping small things well. SCULT INDIA is an AI-first software agency; from 2024 I led engineering for it, architecture, UI/UX, deployment and delivery for a 14-member cross-functional team, and designed SCULT Studio CRM, the internal platform that runs projects, clients and operations [9]. The client products came one at a time, a pest-control business site in Goa, a music label, a digital library, a media company, and each one taught delivery under a deadline, which no college project can.

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Leading fourteen people while still a student is its own story, mostly about saying no and writing things down [6].

How did the GenAI role come, and what did it produce?

From the portfolio. NextUpgrad Web Solutions hired me as a GenAI engineer for February to July 2026 on the strength of shipped systems, and in those six months I independently designed, built and shipped five production AI applications: RAG.NextUpgrad, a retrieval platform with hybrid search, reranking, streaming citations and a confidence gate; FineTune Studio, a QLoRA fine-tuning platform with live telemetry; DocuLens AI, schema-validated document extraction with deterministic compliance scoring; FaceVision, browser-only face recognition and liveness that stores embeddings, never images; and the OCR & Speech Workspace, page-batched OCR, live speech-to-text and document chat with page citations. All with Docker, CI/CD, structured logging and metrics [1][10].

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Six months, five systems, because the habits, shipping weekly, testing, writing READMEs, evaluating honestly, were already three years old. The role did not create the habits. The habits created the role.

What actually mattered, in order?

Shipping small things every week. A community to learn and teach inside. Hackathons for scope and demos. Real clients for delivery. Writing in public so people could find the work. Reading the papers that mattered with a notebook open. Saying yes to every session and judging invitation early. Applying before I felt ready. Not: the college's name, certificates, or waiting for a placement cell.

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What would I tell my first-year self?

Start the community in month one, not month six. Post the first project even though it is embarrassing; the embarrassment is the point. Go to the hackathon two hours away. Learn to write a README before learning a fourth framework. Talk to the strangers at events. Ask for the client work. Read the papers, they are shorter than the tutorials. And stop comparing your college to the ones with placement cells; compare your GitHub to theirs.

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The longer letter is on the portfolio [8]. Most of it is the list above, said more gently.

Was it worth it, and what is next?

Yes. The year of shipping, 2025 into 2026, produced the systems, the team and the sessions, and it produced this site: a hundred pages answering the questions students and engineers actually search, written from what I built [7]. Next is more of the same at a larger scale: GenAI roles and products, more campuses, more judging panels, and a community that outgrows me. If you are in a first-year seat in a college nobody has heard of, the path is open, and the first step is a project this week.

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Talk to me

If you are at a college like mine and want the path explained in person, that is one of the sessions I give, free for student communities. Email pranjulrathour41@gmail.com or use pranjulrathour.scult.in/invite. The projects are all public at github.com/Pranjulrathour [10].

Pranjul Rathour

GenAI Engineer · Kanpur, Uttar Pradesh, India

GenAI engineer and AI product builder with 2+ years shipping production-grade AI systems: RAG pipelines, fine-tuned LLMs, hybrid retrieval and multi-modal apps across vision, speech and OCR, architected end to end from ingestion to deployment. Leads engineering for SCULT INDIA's 14-member team, founded the 500+ member TechVerse Enclave community and has mentored 200+ students. Three hackathon first prizes: Changethon 2025 (IIT Roorkee), Product Genesis at Vividhotsava 2025 (CSJMU Kanpur) and BYTEBATTLE (MeetKats).

Open to GenAI roles, hackathon judging, mentorship sessions and guest talks at colleges. Email pranjulrathour41@gmail.com.

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