Staff Engineer, Teragonia
Developing Technology and Making Connections
Ojas Sawant (CMU 2015) is a developer’s developer. With a specialization in computer vision and generative artificial intelligence and cloud technologies, he creates tools that amplify the efforts of his colleagues, other developers and teams.
He was recently recruited to Teragonia, where he helps private equity-backed and founder-owned companies to drive value creation through analytics engineering and AI solutions.
Teragonia wooed Ojas from Intel, where he worked on various cloud software architecture, computer vision and generative AI projects geared towards developer tools and end-user experiences. That multiple-hat exposure gave him experience with depth-sensing cameras, game engine and graphics rendering pipelines, robotic arms, optimizing AI models, dabbling in virtual and augmented reality tech stacks, and mentoring engineers.
“My journey at Intel has been at intersections,” he says. “I tackled how to deliver software that somebody else will use to make an experience out of it. I make sure it runs optimally on computer hardware, and I consider how developers and end users will be able to get a good ROI out of it.”
His experience at intersections started while studying at Carnegie Mellon’s Entertainment Technology Center. He’s kept up with his interest in blending technology with creativity through rapid prototyping, and recently published his first book on a related topic. “Visual Storytelling with Generative AI: A Practical Handbook for Modern Filmmakers and Content Creators” guides creatives to integrate AI into their processes.
“One of the things I address is crafting effective AI prompts to create images, audio and video clips,” he says. “I help content creators communicate better with AI to improve their process of iterating. This helps creatives be more effective in using AI tools.”
The common thread across Ojas’ varied roles is making connections and bringing different technical personas together to create new tools and capabilities.
“I like to bring people together to innovate, creating a beautiful union of their areas of domain expertise that connects the dots,” he says.
Story by Elizabeth Speed