David Antwi

Software Engineer. Yale University, EECS, Class of 2028. Open to software engineering internships.

I build AI systems and full-stack products that real people use, from a platform running in 30+ countries to the autonomy stack for Yale's Mars rover.

david.antwi@yale.edu · GitHub · LinkedIn · X · Resume (PDF) · Resume (Markdown) · Resume (JSON)

Experience

Software Engineer, Tech Team (AI and Full-Stack), BENMP (Jul 2026 to Present)

Part-time · International organization, 30+ countries

• Built and launched the organization's partner management platform, now holding 16,000+ partners across 30+ countries and used by admins at 100 regional hubs (TypeScript, Next.js, Supabase).
• Built mobile money payment reconciliation, plus guardrailed, provider-agnostic WhatsApp automation.
• Built a grounded, read-only AI assistant over partner data: code computes every figure, the model only explains it.
• Archived 26,000+ legacy records with zero loss, then took the hub platform from Ghana to 30+ countries in a month.

Autonomy Lead, Yale Mars Rover Team (Sep 2026 to Present)

University Rover Challenge 2027 · Yale Undergraduate Robotics

• Built the ROS 2 mission state machine for both autonomy missions, with command guards, cancellation, timeouts, and stale-result rejection, in a package with 91 tests (Python).
• Integrated missions with Nav2 navigation and the team's fused localization in Gazebo, and fixed a GPS initialization race that could corrupt position estimates.
• Set up ARM64 and x86-64 Docker environments and GitHub Actions build and test pipelines for the team.

Undergraduate Researcher, O'Hern Lab, Yale Mechanical Engineering (Sep 2026 to Present)

Industry-sponsored drone swarm project · New Haven, CT

• Own sim-to-real transfer for a 4-drone Crazyflie swarm trained with reinforcement learning in simulation, so policies behave the same on real drones.
• Wrote the team's literature review of 30+ papers on sim-to-real methods for quadrotors and swarms, comparing simulators and transfer approaches for our hardware.

Software Engineering Intern, Beakr, Inc. (Stealth Startup) (May 2026 to Aug 2026)

AI memory platform for life sciences research · New York, NY

• Designed and shipped Beakr Interviews, an AI system that finds gaps in a lab's knowledge base, interviews the right researcher by text or voice, and turns answers into cited wiki entries (Python, Postgres, Redis Streams, per-organization feature flags).
• Led the computer-use desktop agent: rebuilt search over 80K+ files, made every answer cite its source file, and got it running reliably on Windows by fixing 35 release-blocking defects (Rust).
• Extended the desktop agent to launch and supervise coding agents (Claude Code, Codex) on the user's computer, with explicit approval before each run and a full audit log.
• Built the agent's write access to 19 external services, with scoped permissions and user confirmation before every action.

Software Engineering Intern, SynovAI (Oct 2025 to May 2026)

AI retrosynthesis startup · New Haven, CT · via Yale Helix Fellowship

• Designed and built a vendor-aware stock filtering feature that shows researchers only routes whose starting materials are purchasable, across 5 vendor catalogs of 2.5M+ compounds.
• Built a chemical-safety layer that pulls GHS hazard data from PubChem and flags hazards on each molecule in a route.
• Built a self-serve fine-tuning pipeline (PyTorch, QLoRA) covering validation, training, and automated evaluation.
• Led a UI/UX overhaul of the researcher platform (React, Next.js), redesigning the settings and results views.

Undergraduate Research Intern, The Faboratory, Yale (Aug 2025 to May 2026)

Soft robotics lab · New Haven, CT

• Worked on smart wearable systems that combine sensors, soft actuators, and machine learning for adaptive motion support.
• Wrote the C++ firmware for an upper-body soft exosuit sensing rig: four BNO085 IMUs behind an I2C multiplexer, capacitive touch sensing, a custom quaternion library, and joint-angle estimation.

Projects

• Better Office Hours: A real-time voice tutor that talks students through concepts and problems while drawing diagrams and equations on a live whiteboard or highlighting their uploaded notes. It gives hints, not answers. (1st place · YaleAI x SpaceXAI Cursor Build Challenge) Code
• Intentionality: A gamified productivity platform for students: quests, XP, streaks, focus sessions, and friend accountability, with an AI planner grounded in your calendar and coursework. (300+ users) Live Code
• Cloud Coding Agent: A coding agent in a cloud sandbox that never grades its own homework. It writes a definition of done, builds, then a second agent with fresh context and read-only access tests the running app and shows evidence for every check. Live
• BENMP Partner Platform: The partner management system for an international nonprofit. Hub admins upload spreadsheets through a validating import wizard; the office reconciles giving and messages partners from one console. (16,000+ partners · 97 hubs) Code
• Mars Rover Autonomy: The autonomy stack for Yale's Mars rover: navigation, a mission coordinator, and the tooling to see what the robot was thinking after every run.
• Ocura: Smart glasses software for people who are blind or have low vision: a voice-in, voice-out assistant that describes the scene and can keep looking for an object in the background. (2nd place · Google x Yale SOM Build with AI Hackathon)
• TicketDodge: A map that predicts your odds of getting a parking ticket in New York, built on NYC Open Data. (Best Use of Cursor · Ramp Builders Cup) Live Code
• Ember Run: A 2D anime parkour game about flow and momentum. Six characters with distinct kits, three chapters, boss fights, and music synthesized in code. Live
• YMAU Registration and Review Desk: Conference site, Stripe registration, and a blind-review desk for delegate applications and financial aid. 4,000+ delegates and 109 delegations signed up for YMAU VI so far. Live
• YMAU Delegate Training Platform: Video training platform for 335+ delegates, with watch-time tracking that merges watched segments so skipping ahead does not count, quizzes, and QR-verifiable certificates.
• HJC Portal: A conference logistics portal that replaced spreadsheets: access-code login, three roles, itineraries, an audit log, and PDF/CSV export. Code
• African Allied Health Network: A private networking platform for an allied healthcare summit community: profiles, a searchable directory, connections, and realtime messaging. Installable as a phone app.
• Press Archive: A research tool that turns exported news articles into a searchable archive, then uses an LLM to code tone and events, with human-agreement checks.
• Northline: A mutual fund calculator for first-time investors that forecasts returns with CAPM. Built in the Goldman Sachs Emerging Leaders Series.
• Biomedical Research Agent: A command-line research agent that answers biomedical questions with tools over PubMed, OpenAlex, UniProt, and the Protein Data Bank. Code
• Game Agents: Agent loops built from scratch, no frameworks: custom grid worlds, a tool interface, a planner, and an MCP server so any client can play. Code
• CircleBack: A voice-first networking CRM: talk about who you met, and it builds a 3D knowledge graph of your network. Code
• ExoSense: Multi-sensor firmware for calibrating an upper-body soft exosuit: four IMUs, capacitive sensing, and joint-angle estimation on a Feather nRF52840. Code
• Imitation Learning Agents: High school research on teaching simulated agents by imitation instead of slow trial-and-error reinforcement learning. Took it to ISEF.
• Academic Matcher: A retrieval tool that matches students to research labs based on what professors actually work on. Code
• Journal.ai: Voice and written journaling that transcribes entries and turns them into cleaner writing, summaries, and reflections. Code

Leadership

• Project Director, Yale AI Association: Run the project teams program that places undergraduates on semester-long teams building applied AI.
• Lead Developer · Committee Chair, Yale Model African Union: Rebuilt the conference site and built the registration platform (4,000+ delegates and 109 delegations for YMAU VI), and chaired a 30-delegate committee at the Accra conference.
• Student Ambassador, Tech & AI Innovation Lab, Yale Africa Innovation Symposium: Co-led a two-day AI founder simulation that won Best Innovation Lab at YAIS IV.
• Emerging Leaders Series Fellow, Goldman Sachs: Built the CAPM engine for Northline, a mutual fund calculator for first-time investors, on a six-person team.
• Software Developer · Catalyst Mentor, Yale Computer Society: Contribute to the Yale Meals app, and mentored 5 students from their first React project to a deployed build.

Awards

• 1st Place, YaleAI x SpaceXAI Cursor Build Challenge (2026)
• Best Use of Cursor, Ramp Builders Cup (2026)
• 2nd Place, Google x Yale SOM Build with AI Hackathon (2026)
• Best Innovation Lab, Yale Africa Innovation Symposium IV (2026)
• Catapult Fellow, Prometheus X (2026)
• YC Startup School, Y Combinator (2026)
• Emerging Leaders Series, Goldman Sachs (2026)
• Helix Fellow, Yale Helix (2025)
• ISEF Finalist, International Science and Engineering Fair (2023)
• Science Champion Award, USAID (2023)
• Silver Award, Eskom Expo International Science Fair (2021)

Skills

• Languages: Python, Java, JavaScript/TypeScript, C++, C, Rust
• Frameworks & Libraries: React, Next.js, React Native, FastAPI, Flask, Spring Boot, PyTorch, Anthropic SDK, ROS 2
• Tools: PostgreSQL, Supabase, Redis, Docker, Git, CI/CD, Linux, Hugging Face, Claude Code, Cursor

Education

• Yale University, B.S. Electrical Engineering and Computer Science (Expected May 2028)
• Columbia University in Paris, Summer immersion, Accelerated Intermediate French (Summer 2025)