Available for collaboration

Amar Kumar Mandal

Backend Engineer. ML & Security Researcher

Hi, I'm Amar. I spent two years building secure, scalable backends in production but then fell down the machine learning rabbit hole and didn't climb back out. Today I'm an Erasmus Mundus scholar researching how to make machine learning private and secure by design.

About

I started out as a backend developer, and for two years that meant real production work implementing end-to-end encryption, multi-factor auth, microservices talking over a Kafka cluster, the whole system monitored on Prometheus and Grafana so we'd catch failures before users ever felt them. I genuinely liked the system-design side: drawing service boundaries, thinking about scale, making distributed system work in tandem.

What I liked less was that the day-to-day slowly became routine: another API, another feature. I wanted harder problems.

The shift came during my master's. My research kept pulling me toward machine learning: my first accepted paper looks at the privacy–utility tradeoff in differentially private classifiers, and the more I dug in, the more I realized the problems I actually wanted to spend my time on lived at the intersection of ML, math, and security. It's challenging in the way backend stopped being: real problem-solving, not routine.

So that's where I am now: an Erasmus Mundus scholar in Applied Cybersecurity (CyberMACS) at Kadir Has University in Istanbul, bringing the engineering discipline I built shipping production systems to machine learning that's private and secure by design.

Currently

Erasmus Mundus Scholar

CyberMACS, Kadir Has University

Previously

Senior Backend Developer

Veda Studios

Research & Publications

An Empirical Study of the Privacy–Utility Trade-off in Differentially Private Classifiers

23rd CIIT Conference, 2026 Accepted
PDF

SSHafe: Real-Time SSH Brute-Force Detection & a Novel Credential Rotation Standard

Under Review Submitted
PDF

Architectural Resilience in Privacy-Preserving Health Informatics: A Multi-Dataset Study of Differential Privacy Trade-offs

In Progress

Projects

Flashcode — Anki, but built for people who write code — main view
Flashcode — Anki, but built for people who write code — screenshot 2
Flashcode — Anki, but built for people who write code — screenshot 3
Flashcode — Anki, but built for people who write code — screenshot 4
Flashcode — Anki, but built for people who write code — screenshot 5
Flashcode — Anki, but built for people who write code — screenshot 6
Flashcode — Anki, but built for people who write code — screenshot 7

Flashcode — Anki, but built for people who write code

It started as a frustration: reviewing code snippets in Anki while learning DSA in Rust, and every time I pasted code onto a card, the indentation broke. So I built my own. Flashcode is a desktop app that stores code with formatting intact and schedules reviews using SM-2 spaced repetition. It's grown into a full study tool — quiz mode that imitates a real exam, a code snippet library, and notes, all in one place.

TauriRustReactSM-2 / Spaced Repetition
GitHub
Grayscale Image Colorizer — main view

Grayscale Image Colorizer

A convolutional autoencoder that takes a black-and-white image and predicts its color. I worked in the LAB color space so the model only learns the two color channels (a, b) from brightness (L) — keeping the learning problem clean and focused. Trained with an augmentation pipeline (rotation, zoom, shear, flips) and wrapped in a React + Flask interface for upload and colorization.

PythonConvolutional AutoencoderLAB Color SpaceFlaskReact
GitHub

Technical Skills

Languages

Python Python JavaScript JavaScript TypeScript TypeScript C C C++ C++ Rust Rust Go Go

Backend & Infrastructure

Node.js Node.js Express ExpressJS NestJS NestJS MongoDB MongoDB PostgreSQL PostgreSQL Docker Docker Kubernetes Kubernetes AWS Microservices Microservices

Machine Learning

Supervised Learning Regression Classification Time Series Analysis

Security & Networking

RSA AES Diffie-Hellman Differential Privacy Differential Privacy Homomorphic Encryption Homomorphic Encryption Signal Protocol Signal Protocol (E2E) IPsec CCNA Certified

Awards & Certifications

Erasmus Mundus Scholar

Kadir Has University, Istanbul, Türkiye

Fully funded Joint Master's degree scholarship (Selective international program)

Cisco

Cisco Certified Network Associate (CCNA)

Cisco · May 2026

Verify
Nepal Engineering Council

Certified Professional Engineer

Nepal Engineering Council

Verify
Coursera

Advanced Learning Algorithms

Coursera · Nov 2024

Verify
Coursera

Supervised Machine Learning: Regression and Classification

Coursera · Aug 2024

Verify

Get in Touch

Open to collaborations in ML research, privacy-preserving systems, and backend engineering. Feel free to reach out.