Harshal Gajjar

Harshal Gajjar is an AI Forward-Deployed Engineer at C3 AI, based in the San Francisco Bay Area. Harshal leads Agentic AI harness development for the Forward-Deployed Engineering organisation at C3 AI, and since January 2026 has been building a stealth-mode startup in the Agentic AI space. Harshal cofounded Shram.io in 2024, where he led the pivot from a Jira-competitor product to an AI assistant that reached #2 Product of the Day on Product Hunt.

Harshal holds an M.S. in Computer Science (Machine Learning specialisation) from Georgia Tech and a B.Tech in Computer Science from IIT Dharwad, where he was part of the institute's foundational class. He spent three summers at Wolfram Research in Boston — first as a summer researcher in 2018, then as an instructor for high-school students in 2019 and 2020 — and was a Wolfram Student Ambassador throughout his undergrad.

Outside of work, Harshal is a long-distance cyclist and a vertical and horizontal caver, active with the San Francisco Bay Chapter (SFBC) grotto. In 2019 he was part of the Hubballi Bicycle Club Guinness World Record for the longest single line of bicycles.

Contact Harshal at mail@harshalgajjar.com.

←Harshal Gajjar/What "forward-deployed" actually means
← feed
piece·

What "forward-deployed" actually means

A forward-deployed engineer is not a consultant. The job isn't to draw an architecture diagram and leave. The job is to embed in a customer's codebase, ship the thing that has to ship this quarter, and walk out leaving behind code their engineers will not delete the day you leave.

The hardest part is restraint. You can see the ten things you'd refactor. You ship two of them and write a doc about the other eight. The two you ship are the ones that have to be there for the next FDE to land softly.

#fde#c3