Eeda Rijal

AI Product Manager with 7+ years of experience building and shipping AI, hardware, and digital products across the full lifecycle - from 0-to-1 concept through launch, experimentation, and commercialization. Co-founded and scaled a 45-person product company, led a hardware startup turnaround that launched 4 products in 6 months and closed a 50K-unit fintech order, and drove 40% quarterly revenue growth across commerce platforms. Experienced in LLM strategy, AI evaluation, human-in-the-loop workflows, and AI-enabled automation.

Microsoft Imagine

Cup 2018 AI World Winner with an M.S. in AI & Business Analytics and active research in LLM risk measurement.

Graduate Research Assistant - Digital Platform & Curriculum - CyberReady Florida, University of South Florida - Tampa, FL

(2025-06)

• Redesigned a government cybersecurity awareness curriculum aligned with NIST CSF 2.0, reaching 1,500+ Florida government and state employees; launched a companion GRC training program.
• Monitored activation, completion, and engagement KPIs; analyzed learner friction and improved course completion rates by 20%.
• Applied LLM-assisted workflows and prompt systems with Azure ML, shortening curriculum design, QA review, and interactive learning iteration cycles, reducing modules deployment time by 20%

Graduate Research Assistant - AI Product Development - Tampa General Hospital / University of South Florida - Tampa, FL

(2025-02 - 2025-06)

• Led 0-to-1 development of an AI-powered assistive mobile app for hearing-impaired drivers, detecting emergency sirens and critical road sounds with real-time haptic and visual alerts; owned customer discovery, usability testing, MVP validation, and model-performance evaluation at 92% accuracy.
• Used human-in-the-loop validation cycles with Python scripts and JIRA to guide roadmap decisions, resulting in faster feature prioritization and clearer development focus
• Aligned business, user, and engineering priorities to drive timely delivery.

Chief Product Manager - Yes Helping Hands IT Solutions - Pokhara, Nepal

(2024-05 - 2024-12)

• Owned product roadmap and P&L for two AI-enabled commerce platforms; drove 40% revenue growth in Q1 through rapid prototyping, product-market fit validation, and lean development cycles.
• Recruited, mentored, and led a cross-functional team of 9 engineers, designers, QA, and marketers; built Power BI dashboards and performed funnel analysis to track acquisition, activation, and retention, which enabled data-driven decisions that increased user activation rates by 37%
• Built durable culture and operating processes, then selected and onboarded a successor; company has since grown to a team of 24.

Chief Technology Officer - Yarsa Tech - Pokhara, Nepal

(2022-12 - 2023-08)

• Recruited to rescue an investor-backed hardware startup on the verge of shutdown; rebuilt product and operational execution, converting multi-year R&D by a 15+ engineer team into commercial launch of 4 hardware products in 6 months.
• Secured eSewa partnership, generating NPR 20M+ in revenue and a 50K-unit order.
• Defined product strategy, roadmap, pricing, commercialization, and performance metrics using KPI design and cohort analysis, while managing cross-border procurement, customs, and regulatory requirements; this ensured compliance and launched new products within 4 months

Delivery Project Associate, Pilot Team - CloudFactory - Kathmandu, Nepal

(2022-01 - 2022-11)

• Designed workflow processes and performance analytics for enterprise AI data-annotation pipelines serving Tesla and Mitsubishi; reduced delivery time by 20% while meeting client OKRs and quality standards.
• Managed a 25-member cross-functional team and coordinated client feedback loops, applying backlog prioritization and KPI design to move pilots to production at enterprise scale, resulting in reduction of project delivery time by 7%

Co-Founder / Product Manager - SochWare - Lalitpur, Nepal

(2017-01 - 2021-12)

• Founded and scaled a digital product company to 45 people, delivering 45+ production applications across ERP, LMS, and health platforms for 35+ enterprise and SMB clients with defined SLAs and profitability targets.
• Built E-Agrovet, an AI crop-disease detection platform used by 670 farmers in 34 cities; Microsoft Imagine Cup 2018 AI World Winner.
• Owned product vision, roadmap, pricing, and P&L for multiple product lines using tools such as Jira and Tableau; ensured implementations complied with security, compliance, and regulatory standards, resulting in successful audit approvals and zero compliance breaches.

M.S.

• Artificial Intelligence and Business Analytics - University of South Florida, Muma College of Business (2024-08 - 2026-08)

Graduate Certificate - Information Assurance - University of South Florida, Muma College of Business (2024-08 - 2026-08)

B.E.

• Electronics and Communication Engineering - Pokhara University, Nepal Engineering College (2020-12)