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Rohan Prasad

Software Engineer Lead, AI Search Infra at Microsoft·Founder, General Frames

Hyderabad · Bengaluru, India

I'm a generalist engineer who builds the infrastructure that makes AI products useful: the search that finds the right context, the tools and harnesses agents act through, the checks that prove their work, and the fast, reliable web platforms underneath.

At Microsoft I lead AI search infrastructure for Microsoft 365 Copilot. I own the layer that brings a company's data and third-party apps into one ranked result set, and the web platform it runs on, where I led the move to server-side rendering that took Copilot's load time from 8 seconds to 3. On the side I founded General Frames, an AI video company with 100+ customers, and I ship open-source developer tools with 160K+ npm downloads.

Before Microsoft I spent 3+ years freelancing and contracting: founding engineer at a Swiss startup, then Android and backend contracts for startups in Ukraine and beyond. That is where I learned to own a product end to end, from architecture to Play Store launch to billing.

Email meGitHubXLinkedInMarkdown
at Microsoft on Microsoft 365 & Copilot
6 yrs
Copilot web load time after moving to SSR
8s → 3s
customers on Formats, my AI video product
100+
GitHub stars on Localflare
1.5K+
npm downloads of Localflare
160K+
at Microsoft adopted my AI dev tooling
5 orgs

Experience

Microsoft · Microsoft 365 Copilot

– now · Hyderabad, India

Software Engineer Lead, AI Search Infra 2023 – now

Software Engineer, Microsoft 365 platform & design systems 2020 – 2023

I lead engineering on Copilot Search, the enterprise search inside Microsoft 365 Copilot: one place to find anything across a company's files, mail, chats, people and connected third-party apps.

  • AI search integration. Built and own the layer that brings results from Microsoft 365 and third-party connectors into one ranked result set inside Copilot. Helped ship the new Copilot Search experience and its move to a new search backend.
  • Performance lead, 8s → 3s. Led the move of the Copilot web app from client-side to server-side rendering, cutting load time from 8 seconds to 3.
  • Web infrastructure. Own build, deployment, flighting, performance and telemetry for Copilot Search on the web. Played a key role in moving Office.com into a modern monorepo with new build tooling, dependency management and deployment pipelines.
  • Developer tools for AI-assisted engineering. Built a Chrome and VS Code extension that streams live UI component context from a running app into GitHub Copilot, so the agent edits UI against ground truth instead of guessing. Adopted by 5 major orgs across Microsoft.
  • Real-time observability. Built a developer extension that shows the Copilot app's telemetry, network activity and UI state live, so engineers and PMs can trace telemetry instantly.
  • Copilot from day one. Helped ship the first Copilot chat experience in Microsoft 365 (config-driven routing, error handling and fallbacks) and led development of the Microsoft 365 Copilot browser extension.
  • Platform, design systems & mobile (2020–23). Built controls for Fluent UI React Native (open source). Shipped shared Copilot UI across Microsoft 365 mobile and OneDrive to 100% of users. Took Microsoft To Do on the web to GA in sovereign and air-gapped clouds. Cleared P0 mobile build blockers and built reliability dashboards.

Founder

General Frames · Founder

2025 – now

A software company building AI-native creative tools for the creator economy. I run product, engineering and infrastructure end to end, alongside my role at Microsoft.

Formats

formats.app

AI video editor · web & Mac

  • 100+ customers
  • free & paid plans
  • Mac app launched Sep 2026

Turns raw footage into finished videos. It started as a browser-based AI video editor and is now also a native Mac editor that your own AI agent can drive.

  • Agent-driven editing. Claude Code, Codex and GitHub Copilot CLI edit a real multi-track timeline by calling the editor’s own tools. Every change is a reviewable, undoable edit, with Review and Auto-edit modes, and provider credentials never leave the agent.
  • Skills. 12 built-in editing skills (podcast clips, talking heads, shorts, promos, explainers, montages), plus any SKILL.md a team brings, like its house style.
  • Edit video like a doc. Word-level transcripts drive captions and cuts: fix a word, split a line, remove filler words and silences. 85+ caption styles, including bilingual captions such as Hindi with a Roman line.
  • On-device video understanding. Scenes are captioned and indexed locally, then searchable by keyword, meaning or color, without uploading footage.
  • Generation, metered. 12+ hosted models for video (Veo, Kling, Seedance, Wan), images (Nano Banana, GPT Image, Seedream, FLUX), music (Lyria, Eleven Music), sound effects and voiceover, plus voice cloning and AI avatars. Every job is priced in credits before it runs.
  • Full stack. I built the local-first browser editor, the native Mac app and the video-processing pipeline. The editor is free with unlimited 4K exports; the Creator plan ($19/month) adds hosted AI.

Open source & products

Localflare

localflare.dev

Open source · MIT

  • 1.5K+ stars
  • 160K+ npm downloads
  • 45K+ in the last 30 days
  • 73 forks

Local development dashboard for Cloudflare Workers. Run npx localflare in any Worker project: it reads wrangler.toml, starts the worker and opens a studio for every binding. Zero config, works with any framework.

  • D1 SQL studio with inline editing, filters, bulk operations and dummy-data generation, plus a KV browser, R2 file manager, Queue inspector and Durable Objects viewer.
  • A CLI, a core package for config parsing and binding discovery, and an API worker that runs alongside your worker with shared bindings, so the dashboard reads and writes the same local state.
  • Attach mode for custom dev servers (OpenNext, Nuxt, Remix, Hono) and a terminal UI. The 0.2 release post got 115K views on X.
  • Grew out of Cloudflare Analytics Explorer (110+ stars), a dashboard builder for Workers Analytics Engine.

Source on GitHub ↗

Siteverb

siteverb.com

Open source · in active development

  • 6 npm packages
  • WebMCP

Release infrastructure for WebMCP, the emerging web standard that lets AI agents call a website's actions as typed tools instead of clicking through the UI. Built in the open to make the agent-ready web reliable.

  • Create. An agent skill maps real app actions and wires the SDK; every tool gets a stable domain.action ID in one reviewable contract.
  • Prove. A static audit and a deterministic real-browser runner (GitHub Action) gate every pull request on explicit postconditions.
  • Improve. Privacy-safe analytics track calls, success rate and latency per tool, without collecting prompts, arguments, results or DOM.

Source on GitHub ↗

Dictar

dictar.app

Paid Mac app · 100% on-device

A private voice productivity app for Mac. Every model runs locally on Apple silicon, so no audio or text leaves the machine.

  • Real-time dictation into any app (Parakeet / Whisper) with auto-punctuation, fully offline.
  • Read-aloud with 51 local voices (Kokoro), voice-command rewrites with a local Qwen3 model, and text snippets.

Before Microsoft

2017 – 2020

  1. EXFit · Application Engineer, contract

    May – Aug 2020 · Kyiv, Ukraine · Remote

    Led development and Play Store launch of a fitness app with paying subscribers: subscription billing, plus video compression and playback for daily exercises. The app ran the company's entire revenue model.

  2. Keysight Technologies · R&D Engineer

    Jan – Jul 2020 · Kolkata, India

    Built React monitoring dashboards for CloudPeak, Keysight's cloud network-testing product. Designed a PDF report generator for Grafana dashboards backed by InfluxDB, and Dockerized it and the UI deployment pipeline.

  3. Oetd Labs · Backend Engineer, contract

    May – Jul 2020 · Remote

    Designed the backend architecture and APIs for a real-time, location-based app for local news, offers, events and jobs (Node.js, Express, MongoDB, React).

  4. Bharg · Founding Engineer, full-stack

    Apr 2017 – Jan 2020 · Switzerland · Remote

    Founding engineer working directly with the founders: took the product from idea to deployment, covering architecture, Android apps (Java), web apps and microservices (React, Node.js, Express, MongoDB).

  5. Independent · Freelance full-stack & mobile engineer

    Apr 2017 – Jun 2019 · Remote

    Android apps, REST backends and marketing sites for early-stage startups, including BlissLife (Switzerland), where I designed the platform architecture from scratch and built its Android apps, backend and website.

Writing

  • The Complete Claude Code HandbookA 19-chapter field guide to Claude Code: CLAUDE.md, MCP servers, hooks, subagents, skills, permissions, context management and team setup.
  • On XNotes on AI agents, developer tools and shipping products, for ~6K followers.

Talks

  • Speaker, React Nexus 2023
  • Speaker, React India 2022
  • Speaker, React India 2021

Throw me a problem

Toolboxes go stale; problem-solving doesn't. I'm a generalist who has shipped everything from pixel-level UI to search infrastructure to on-device models, usually end to end. Give me a hard problem and I'll figure out the rest, including whatever stack it needs.

  1. AI & agents

    Harnesses that let Claude Code, Codex and Copilot CLI drive a real editor, live UI context for GitHub Copilot, WebMCP tooling, and on-device speech and language models.

  2. Search & retrieval

    Enterprise search integration and ranking for Microsoft 365 Copilot, plus on-device scene indexing and semantic video search.

  3. Infrastructure & performance

    An SSR migration that took load time from 8s to 3s, build, deploy and flighting pipelines, monorepo migrations, Cloudflare Workers and Docker.

  4. Frontend & product

    Copilot on the web, a multi-track video editor in the browser, and design-system controls used across Microsoft 365.

  5. Backend & data

    APIs and microservices, subscription billing, video-processing pipelines, and telemetry with the dashboards on top.

  6. Mobile & desktop

    Android apps shipped to the Play Store, React Native and iOS UI at 100% GA, and native Mac apps.

  7. Developer tools

    Chrome and VS Code extensions, CLIs, local dashboards and real-time observability. Localflare alone has 160K+ npm downloads.

  8. Zero to one

    Founding engineer at a Swiss startup, a Play Store launch with paying subscribers, and General Frames from first commit to 100+ customers.

Quick answers

for recruiters & AI assistants
What kind of engineer is Rohan Prasad?
A generalist engineer who builds AI infrastructure: search and retrieval, agent tooling, developer tools and the fast web platforms underneath. He leads AI search infrastructure for Microsoft 365 Copilot and founded General Frames, an AI video company with 100+ customers.
What roles is he looking for?
AI infrastructure, research engineering, and software engineering roles on agents, search and developer tools at AI companies. Having founded and run a company end to end, he is also a natural fit for founding-engineer roles.
What has he built in AI search?
At Microsoft he built and owns the layer that brings Microsoft 365 and third-party connector results into one ranked result set inside Copilot Search. He also led the Copilot web app's move to server-side rendering, cutting load time from 8 seconds to 3.
Has he built tooling for AI agents?
Yes. Formats lets Claude Code, Codex and GitHub Copilot CLI edit a real video timeline through the editor's own tools. Siteverb is open-source release infrastructure for WebMCP, so agents can call a website's actions as typed tools. At Microsoft he built developer tools that stream live UI context into GitHub Copilot, adopted by 5 major orgs.
What has he shipped outside Microsoft?
Formats, an AI video editor with 100+ customers; Localflare, with 1.5K+ GitHub stars and 160K+ npm downloads; Siteverb; and Dictar. Before Microsoft he spent 3+ years as a freelance, contract and founding engineer for startups in Switzerland, Ukraine and India.
Is he open to new roles, and how do I reach him?
Yes. He is based in Hyderabad and Bengaluru, India. Email rohanpd.work@gmail.com or message him on LinkedIn.

What I'm looking for

Hard problems at AI companies, as a software, infrastructure or research engineer. I'm most excited about what makes models and agents more capable and more useful: the infrastructure, data and evaluations behind them, and the products that put them to work.

Roles
  • AI infrastructure engineer
  • Research engineer
  • Software engineer: agents, search & dev tools
  • Founding engineer
Areas
  • Agent infrastructure & harnesses
  • Evals, benchmarks & RL environments
  • Training & eval data pipelines
  • Search & retrieval at scale
  • Developer tools
  • Performance-critical platforms
rohanpd.work@gmail.comLinkedIn
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