Before Yash talks about engineering, he talks about puzzles. He led the cryptic hunt at IIT Palakkad, a nationwide competition that drew teams from across the country. He plays chess. He thinks about problems the way a puzzle solver does, which turns out to be exactly how he thinks about code.

"If you do not love thinking of everything like a puzzle that you have to solve, I don't really think you can come up with really unique or deep releases."

Yash's first job out of IIT was writing Solidity code for smart contracts at a startup in Hong Kong. He ended up there through a connection made at a business school program in Paris during his second year of college. He was the youngest person in the room, and the only engineer.

Being the only technical hire meant handling everything that fell outside the usual job description. It was here he realized a startup environment makes a puzzle-solving mindset essential.

"There's an upside to end-to-end ownership. You get to learn a lot, but it also means wearing a lot of different hats and dealing with problems far beyond a traditional engineering role. Small things like managing DNS records myself, website work, managing our app listing, designing screenshots. In doing that, critical thinking is at the very core. I like to think of everything as a maze that I have to navigate through, and then that makes everything very interesting and fun for me. That makes work fun for me."

The blockchain work itself was less about the technology than about what it represented: a real company, real code, real users.

"I really wanted to get into the mix and start building something, start learning something. For me it was more about getting real world experience, getting into a company, seeing how people really work. What I really like is building full stack applications, coding something and getting to see the end result immediately, you have people using your product."

That instinct for building things that people actually use is what pulled him toward Jurin AI.

When Yash first heard about Jurin AI, he could not find anything about it.

"There was nothing online. It was very secretive. I'm like, what are these guys really doing? Am I going to be a spy or something? This mystique added to the allure for me actually."

When he joined in 2024, he was the only engineer in the company. The daily rhythm of those early weeks was unlike anything a typical engineering job would offer.

"I used to have 1:1s with Rise daily for like two hours. He used to teach me a lot about business, a lot about how different cultures work. I also like to be well-rounded in all aspects, so I loved those sessions."

The company at that point was small enough that its survival was genuinely uncertain. Yash made his peace with that early.

"I thought that even if we do not make it (because at that time it seemed like a pretty far possibility that we'd ever have more than 10 employees, I could have never imagined it), whatever happens at the end of the day, I'll be a better person out of it."

Yash’s first task was to build a product that would let users talk to an AI Santa.

"We had a customer who wanted a Santa app so people can talk to Santa. I had to build it in a week because Christmas was coming. Rise sent me this text from an end user who really used our product and they said ‘our daughter loved it a lot, thank you so much.’ Rise told me, your product made somebody happy. At the end of the day that is why you build stuff. It has a real impact."

In the months that followed, Yash built two of Jurin AI's most foundational features.

The first was the public chat, a URL that end users could hit and immediately start talking to an AI agent, embeddable in any website.

"I built that pretty early on, more than 1.5 years ago. I was still an intern. I thought this was going to be this insurmountable task and I did not think I would be able to build it end to end. Now it's become one of our most used products. We have millions of users who have signed up on our public chat. The way it has scaled and stayed secure is something I would have never imagined at the start."

The second was Jurin support, a tab built into every customer workspace so users could reach the team directly inside the app, without having to send an email or look for a contact form.

"The problem is that can never go down because that is the support page. It was really complicated architecture we had to figure out with cross-workspace conversations. If that broke down, then what's the point of having Jurin support."

Both were built fast, under pressure, with limited manpower. The email integration that came later was harder technically, with legacy systems, backwards compatibility, every email client behaving differently… but he had more time and more people by then. The early builds were harder because of the clock.

"It's not very hard engineering wise, but given the time scale, I had four days, that was the hardest part."

"It's not only a product that you're building. You have to deal on a day-to-day with people problems. People come up with very weird kinds of problems and everybody operates differently. We don't have a department that does team building activities weekly. That is something I feel I have to do."

He arranges games with the interns. He tries to stay reachable for anything that comes up. And sometimes the job asks more than that.

"You give somebody a task and you expect them to do it in two days. They take a week and come back to you and say it's not done. I've had people who have literally broken down in front of me and I'm like I'm not that old to deal with that. But you have to because you are leading the team and you have to set an example."

"The people side of things is also very tough. It's a skill that takes some time to build. It also helps to ground you as a better person."

There are two answers to this. The first is practical.

"Bug reports always keep you up. They always keep you coming back to work."

The second is something harder to manufacture.

"I do not feel a lack of motivation 90% of the time because I am in awe of the product almost every single day. There's almost every single day you open the product and there's this new thing that's popped up and you're like you would have never imagined this a year and a half ago."

He remembers what Jurin 1.0 looked like. He was there when the features being built now were just things people talked about.

"These were all just stories. ‘We would have this email connector, we would have a calendar integration…’, but all of that coming true is really what keeps me motivated. Can't wait for what's going to happen next."

Ask Yash who has taught him the most at Jurin AI and the answer comes quickly.

"Farz has taught everybody a lot. He used to be our primary code reviewer when we were only four people. The kind of code reviews he used to leave, I used to really enjoy getting feedback from him on my code. He always had amazing insights. Anytime we are blocked or there's a really tough engineering decision, you just hop on a call with him, tell him about the problem, and he instantly always has an answer."

One of Yash’s favorite quotes is "a jack of all trades is a master of none, but oftentimes better than a master of one."

"How do you know you do not love cinema if you've never really watched cinema? How do you ever tell that you do not love art or the opera if you've never watched it? I really like trying every single thing. I just do not want to be a good engineer. I want to be a good human being as well in general."

He has music playing in his room around the clock, even when he sleeps. He maintains a Letterboxd account. He has an Instagram page dedicated to music recommendations.

"I don't think I would be able to produce the same amount of output that I do without music. And a lot of really good films teach you a lot on how to deal with certain situations in your life. That helps you in people management."

When asked which film would characterize this phase of his life: