Biography

Yashwant Bezawada is a Software Engineer and former Graduate Teaching Assistant at George Mason University, specializing in Generative AI, Large Language Models, and enterprise-scale distributed systems. He holds a Master of Science in Computer Science from GMU.

Currently serving as a Software Engineer Advisor (GenAI) at FedEx, Bezawada leads the development of production-grade AI systems including customer-facing conversational agents, multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) pipelines, and enterprise LLM integrations that serve millions of users globally. His work spans the full AI/ML lifecycle, from model development and prompt engineering to MLOps infrastructure and production deployment.

At George Mason, Bezawada served as a Graduate Teaching Assistant for introductory programming and object-oriented development courses, where he mentored over 100 students and developed a reputation for making complex technical concepts accessible. His teaching philosophy emphasizes bridging academic theory with industry practice, drawing from his extensive hands-on experience building AI systems at scale.

Prior to his current role, Bezawada worked on enterprise software modernization at FedEx, migrating legacy systems to cloud-native architectures on Azure Kubernetes Service, and contributed to digital transformation initiatives at Navy Federal Credit Union.

For a comprehensive portfolio and additional projects, visit yashwantbezawada.com.

Research Interests

  • Large Language Models (LLMs) and Foundation Models
  • Retrieval-Augmented Generation (RAG) Systems
  • Agentic AI and Multi-Agent Systems
  • Prompt Engineering and LLM Optimization
  • Multimodal AI (Vision-Language Models)
  • MLOps and LLMOps Infrastructure
  • Conversational AI and Dialogue Systems
  • Enterprise AI Integration and Deployment
  • Cloud-Native Distributed Systems

Teaching

IT 106: Introduction to IT Problem Solving Using Computer Programming
Graduate Teaching Assistant
IT 206: Object Oriented Java Programming
Graduate Teaching Assistant

Summarized concepts, conducted lab sessions, formulated assignments, and mentored over 100 students in programming fundamentals and object-oriented concepts.

Education

Master of Science in Computer Science
George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia
2018 - 2020
Bachelor of Technology in Computer Science
KL University, Andhra Pradesh, India
2014 - 2018

Professional Experience

Software Engineer Advisor (GenAI) September 2022 - Present
FedEx Corporate Services, Inc., Collierville, TN
  • Developed a Gen AI-powered customer-facing chatbot for shipment tracking, scheduling, and account queries
  • Led a team to develop a multimodal retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) chatbot integrated with the FedEx knowledge base
  • Architected end-to-end MLOps pipelines to streamline deployments and enable server inference for continuously re-trained models
  • Migrated mission-critical applications to Azure Kubernetes Service (AKS), reducing deployment times by 65% and saving $800K annually
Software Engineer II November 2020 - August 2022
FedEx Corporate Services, Inc., Collierville, TN
  • Developed and maintained global enterprise-level pricing solutions impacting internal and external customers across the globe
  • Spearheaded application modernization including Legacy to CloudOps Migration and WebLogic to Spring Boot Conversion
  • Developed Enterprise Discount Database Archive-Purge process, cutting overall DB size by 11 TB
Software Engineer Intern December 2019 - May 2020
Navy Federal Credit Union, Vienna, VA
  • Refactored existing disputes system using Payment and Dispute Management Suite from Visa and Verifi
  • Part of the NFCU Digital Labs team using Agile methodologies including Scrum, pair programming, and behavior-driven development
  • Refactored dispute management system components, reducing processing times by 40% and increasing user satisfaction by 25%
Graduate Teaching Assistant December 2018 - December 2019
George Mason University, Fairfax, VA
  • GTA for IT 106 (IT Problem-Solving Using Computer Programming) and IT 206 (Object Oriented Java Programming)
  • Summarized concepts, conducted labs, and formulated questions for assignments
  • Mentored over 100 students in programming fundamentals and object-oriented concepts
Software Engineer June 2017 - July 2018
SmatSocial, Hyderabad, India
  • Integrated Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, YouTube & Google+ APIs as connectors in the platform
  • Developed modules for image similarity detection using computer vision techniques
  • Led a team of three to orchestrate a Chrome Extension website assistant

Projects

Optical Character Recognition (OCR) for WikiSource
Developed a Django-based web application for WikiSource to perform OCR on PDF and DJVU files using Google Drive OCR API. The system automatically extracts text and updates the relevant pages in WikiSource.
Django Python Google Drive OCR API WikiSource
MOP-VGAN: Physics-Aware Video Generation
Research project developing a framework that learns physical properties of objects from unlabeled video data using an unsupervised GAN. The model encodes physical laws into its structure and uses observations from videos as supervision.
Python TensorFlow GCP Scikit-Learn