Vikram Murali
Studied at University of Washington
Worked at Amazon
Available tomorrow at 8:00 AM UTC
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About Vikram
I’m someone who cares deeply about making AI actually useful in the real world. A lot of my work has lived at the intersection of AI, product, and execution. I’ve spent time building and thinking about systems that go beyond one-off prompts and flashy demos. The questions I’m most drawn to are: How do you turn AI into a workflow people trust? How do you design agents and automations that actually fit into how people work? And how do you move from “this model is interesting” to “this product is valuable, usable, and adopted”? That perspective comes from working across healthcare, cybersecurity, product strategy, and growth. I’ve built retrieval-grounded systems, automation pipelines, and AI-powered workflows in environments where trust and reliability really matter. I’ve also spent a lot of time teaching and mentoring, founding and scaling the AI Student Collective at UW, serving as a 2-time capstone Teaching Assistant, and helping students and builders translate ambitious AI ideas into clear execution. What I bring as a coach is a mix of technical depth, product thinking, and honest, practical guidance. I can help you think through AI agents, workflows, retrieval, evaluation, and automation systems, but I also care deeply about problem framing, user trust, product strategy, and how to turn an idea into something people actually want to use. If you’re exploring AI automation, agent-based products, or trying to break into AI PM or AI product work, I’d love to help.
Why do I coach?
I coach/teach because I know how much faster people grow when they have someone who can help them see the path more clearly. A big part of my own growth has come from mentors, teachers, and people who took the time to make hard things feel learnable. I’ve also seen how intimidating AI can feel right now, especially because so much of the conversation is either hype-driven or overly technical. A lot of talented people have strong instincts and interesting ideas, but they need help turning that into structure, confidence, and action. That’s the gap I really enjoy helping with. I also genuinely love teaching. Whether it has been mentoring student teams, building AI and product curricula, or helping people think through projects and career decisions, I’ve found that some of the most meaningful work I do is helping others make progress on things that matter to them. Coaching gives me a chance to do that directly not just by sharing information, but by helping someone sharpen their thinking, avoid wasted effort, and move toward the kind of work they actually want to do.
Work Experience
AI Software Engineer
Crest Data
January 2026 - Present
Built an automation system for a Security Operations Center using Python, MCP servers, Jira, and VirusTotal APIs to automate malware alert triage for 300+ daily security alerts. I also worked on an LLM-based threat classification system that generated verdicts, confidence scores, and MITRE ATT&CK mappings, plus production-ready pipelines with logging and error handling.
GTM Product Strategist / Product Manager
Amazon
January 2026 - March 2026
Worked on Gen Z go-to-market strategy for Alexa+, where I helped turn user research, competitive analysis, and onboarding insights into a launch narrative and product positioning strategy. I focused on how to make AI products feel trustworthy, actionable, and easy to adopt, especially for younger users. The work included feature prioritization, creator and campus growth strategy, and defining activation and trust metrics for rollout.
Teaching Assistant — Agentic Cybersecurity with AI and LLMs
University of Washington
August 2025 - December 2025
Served as a Teaching Assistant for a capstone focused on agentic AI systems in cybersecurity, where I supported students building attack/defense workflows and AI-enabled security tools. I helped teams think through system design, workflow orchestration, prompt security, authentication, logging, rate limits, and safe deployment, while also guiding them on how to turn technical experiments into clear product stories and polished demos.
Venture Capital/AI Intern
Empactful Capital
September 2025 - October 2025
Evaluated behavioral health startups by mapping ICPs, care delivery models, and reimbursement dynamics, then translating those into diligence write-ups for investment decisions. I also built a sourcing and prioritization pipeline across Affinity, PitchBook, Zapier, and Postgres to surface high-fit companies weekly, and fine-tuned an explainable scoring model with partners to better match investor judgment.
AI Cybersecurity Engineer
Cognizant
June 2025 - August 2025
Built an AI-driven executive intelligence platform for Corporate Security, using Python, SQL, Claude, Power BI, and retrieval systems over 100K+ cyber metrics, alerts, and policy documents. I helped automate risk reporting, cut manual effort significantly, and designed role-aware AI summaries with QA loops so outputs were accurate, useful, and trustworthy for different stakeholders.
Product Manager
Microsoft
March 2025 - June 2025
Worked as a Product Manager Intern on an AI-powered reputation monitoring system for Standard Chartered Bank, using Python, Azure OpenAI, and vector databases to analyze 50,000+ global customer interactions. I also helped operationalize SOC and Risk Ops triage through clustering, de-duplication, dashboards, and backlog/PRD translation, which improved analyst turnaround and made the workflow more actionable.
Growth Ambassador
Anthropic
February 2025 - June 2025
Served as a Campus Growth Ambassador for Claude, driving student engagement and adoption while gathering feedback on usability and workflow integration. Gave me a front-row view into how users actually evaluate AI tools, what makes a product feel trustworthy, and how adoption happens through community, education, and product experience rather than hype alone.
Teaching Assistant — Scaling Rural Healthcare with AI and LLMs
University of Washington
December 2024 - March 2025
Served as a capstone Teaching Assistant for a course focused on building AI-powered healthcare solutions for underserved rural communities. I mentored student teams on problem framing, workflow design, feature scoping, and demo execution, helping them translate technical ideas into products that were actually usable and relevant in real healthcare settings.
Product Development Intern
Banquet Health
July 2024 - November 2024
At Banquet Health, I helped take a nutrition-label OCR MVP and push it toward real clinical utility. The original system could digitize labels, but adoption among hospital dietitians was low because it did not reliably surface hidden allergens in a way that reduced patient risk. I worked with clinicians to identify the core workflow gap, then helped build and integrate a BERT-based allergen detection module with confidence thresholds and human-review guardrails. The result was a more trusted clinical workflow: adoption across pilot hospitals increased by about 40%, allergen detection precision improved by roughly 20%, and the product moved from “text capture” to “patient risk reduction.”
Vikram was also given offers to work at
Boeing
Education
University of Washington
Bachelors of Science, Data Science and Informatics
2023 - 2026
Built and scaled the AI Student Collective at UW into a 500+ member 501(c)(3) nonprofit, with a mission to democratize AI across disciplines. Created and taught a 6–8 week AI Product Building curriculum that enables both technical and non-technical students to learn AI, build products, and apply AI to their own fields. Led major community programming, including Hack to the Future, the Pacific Northwest’s first traditional AI hackathon. The organization has since become an official university branch of AI Collective, the world’s largest AI community with 200,000+ members. Also served as a 2-time Capstone Teaching Assistant for Scaling Rural Healthcare with AI and LLMs and Agentic Cybersecurity with AI and LLMs, where I mentored teams building real AI solutions, helped shape project direction, and coached students on translating ideas into usable workflows and polished demos. As Co-President of Product Space UW, I teach product thinking end-to-end: user research, problem definition, prioritization, PRDs, storytelling, and execution. I help students prepare for product roles through mock projects, client-facing work, and hands-on collaboration with major tech partners.